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CAN WE BELIEVE? 


Popular Discussions of Fundamental 
Christian Truths | QA OF PRIVEE, 
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/ By 
FRANK M. ‘GOODCHILD, D.D. 





NEw YORK CHICAGO 
Fleming H. Revell Company 


LONDON AND EDINBURGH 


Copyright, MCMXXVI, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 99 George Street 


To My Son 
FRANKLIN MYERS GOODCHILD, M. D. 


who throughout his scientific training and m the 
practice of a learned profession has retained his 
simple faith in the religion taught in the Bible 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/canwebelievepopu00good_0 


FOREWORD 


dhe chapters of this book were in substance first 
delivered as sermons in the Central Baptist 
Church of New York City, where the author 
was pastor for nearly thirty years, and they have been 
given as addresses at Winona and other Bible Confer- 
ences. They still retain the style of spoken words. 
Whenever they have been delivered, they have proved so 
helpful to faith, that many people have asked for their 
publication. In response to these requests the book ap- 
pears. By deliberate intention the treatment of the 
subjects is popular, and the appeal is made to the average 
thoughtful reader, but it is hoped that the arguments 
will bear the scrutiny of the most exacting. 


New York. 





CONTENTS 


I 
THE IMPORTANCE OF BELIEF 


The New Testament emphasizes belief—Important in busi- 
ness, in national life, in the home, and in religion—Loss of 
faith most serious of all losses—Always some who sneer at 
faith, but everybody has a creed—LEHarly Church required 
statement of faith—Definite creed essential to right life— 
Decline of strong convictions to-day—Convictionless people 
not agreeable companions—Definite convictions of truth 
essential to church fellowship—The contention that definite 
faith is unimportant and good works all important denied— 
Social service cannot take the place of faith—New Testa- 
ment insists that belief is of primary importance—Martin 
Luther and Ernst Renan contrasted—Positive faith essential 
to a preacher—Intense faith made the great missionaries— 
Paul a man of faith—No other sort could do his work...... 


IT 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN GOD? 


To think of God does not make one talkative—Reverence 
of Mohammedans for the name of God—Sir Isaac Newton— 
Robert Boyle—Greatness of the subject makes preachers 
hesitate to preach upon it—But men of the world are dis- 
cussing it—Bible assumes that men believe in God—lIt gives 
men right views of God and tells men how they may come 
into right relations with God—Bible intimates that belief 
in God is not so much a matter of piety as of common sense, 
and urges men to use their reason to discern Him—Incident 
of Napoleon—The Arab-—All nature reveals God—Folly of 
atheism—AUsthetic sensibilities, moral convictions, and ideals 
of beauty and goodness argue His existence—What we 
think of God shapes all our other thinking—The value of a 
religion is tested by the view it takes of God—Folly of 
professing to know all about God—Every man paints his 
own picture of God—Child’s view of God—In Jesus Christ 
God has given us a picture of Himself—God transcends all 
our thought of Him—To be certain of God is the only source 
of peace of mind—God still is sovereign—He rules in 
righteousness—Deals out justice—Hates sin—It is a real 
gospel that God is for the good man and will lift him up, 
and He is against the bad man and will throw him down... 


3 . 


11 


26 


A CONTENTS 


Tit 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE? 


Accept the Bible unmutilated—Any subtraction from thé 
Bible would be a mutilation of it—No fear of criticism— 
Conviction unshakeable that it is God’s book and He can take 
care of it—Bible invites criticism—The higher the claim a 
book makes for itself the more searching our scrutiny of it 
should be—There is another way of knowing the Bible than 
by a critical study of the text, or a study of its sources—By 
illumination of the Holy Spirit—Very plain men may know 
the mysteries of the kingdom—The unity of the Bible a 
proof of its divine origin—It is one in its effects, its struc- 
ture, and in the personality it presents—Different from other 
books—Every part of it has been the means of turning men 
from sin—Adapted to all races, every age, and class— 
Singularly uniform character of its books—Great diversity 
of authorship, yet intensely harmonious in character—Fifteen 
hundred years in writing, yet principles unchanged—A 
unity unparalleled—Tllustration of symphony orchestra—Of 
construction of a church—Unity of Bible more remarkable 
in that it contradicts the notions of lands where it was 
written—Pentateuch and the Egyptians—Our Lord’s testi- 
mony to the unity of the Old Testament—The purpose of the 
New Testament we do not need to demonstrate—Unity of 
the Bible mysterious—Cannot add to it or take from it 
without harm—A unit in its purpose, its structure, and in 
its saving effect on those who read it—Because back of its 
many writers ‘is the ons living: God... is vise sss 6 ses wel clei 


IV 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE VIRGIN BIRTH? 


Wonders attending Christ’s birth—Only as you lower your 
conception of the character of Jesus Christ can you feel that 
the story should in any way be modified—Some men in every 
age have considered Christ only a man—When evidence 
overwhelmingly favours His deity they reject it—Even seek 
to destroy the evidence—For many centuries the Church 
has recited its faith in the Virgin Birth—But no doctrine 
has been more virulently and persistently attacked—Though 
its historic foundations are secure, the doctrine is attacked 
to-day by Christian teachers and preachers—Schrempf in 
Germany—The Virgin Birth cannot be separated from the 
other wonders of Christ’s life—Stand or fall tozether—Many 
unscholarly judgments—The true method of science is to 
find the facts and then construct a theory—Dr. Charles E. 
Jefferson on the use of the scissors in critical study of 


42 


CONTENTS 


Bible—What facts support belief in the Virgin Birth—Testi- 
mony of Mary given by Luke—That of Joseph given by 
Matthew—Credibility of those Gospels—Alleged silence of 
Mark, John, and Paul—Unanimity of manuscripts—Alleged 
parallel between Christ’s birth, and that of Greek and 
Roman heroes—Argument from prophecy in Isaiah and in 
Genesis—Best proof of credibility of story of Virgin Birth of 
Christ is the wonderful life He lived—Is acceptance of doc- 
trine important?—Bearing on credibility of New Testament 
—Rejection of doctrine associated with low conception of 
the character of Christ—Value of doctrine in daily Lite hei ebs 


V 


CAN WE BELIEVE THAT JESUS IS THE SON OF GOD? 


What we think of Jesus Christ is fundamental to all our 
life—Never such deep interest in the person of Christ as 
to-day—Hall Caine, Prof. Benjamin Jowett, Prof. Adolf 
Harnack—Man who feels no interest in Jesus Christ has 
lagged behind thinking men—In New Testament times only 
two opinions about Jesus—So all through history—Great 
difference between men—When Christ appears all others 
are on the same level—What Jesus Christ said of Himself— 
Set Himself above Bible, above the Sabbath—Claimed the 
prerogatives of God—Jews rightly charged Him with mak- 
ing Himself equal with God—If His claims were not true, 
He was a liar and an impostor—Cannot stop with simple 
admiration of Christ as purest, wisest and best of men— 
Hither more than that or less—Richard Fuller’s state- 
ment—Richard Watson Gilder’s tribute—Testimony of those 
who stood nearest to Him—Whole course of history has 
proved His claims—Sects that reject the deity of Christ do 
not grow—Schism in Congregationalist churches a hundred 
years ago—Many who have rejected Christ’s claims have 
later acknowledged them—David Friedrich Strauss, William 
Lecky, Ernst Renan—Whole world is recognizing that Jesus 
is without a peer—Validity of His claims is still being 
demonstrated—Most conclusive evidence of Christ’s deity is 
in the renewal of one’s own heart—Unanimous testimony of 
creatures that came under His power...... Gis oo oie ele erat atuvg aie 


vi 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES? 


Century ago miracles held a different place in Christian 
thought from what they hold to-day—Paley’s testimony— 
To-day men depreciate the miracles—But they are given to 
us on same testimony as other parts of Christ’s life—Cut 
them out of the Gospels and there is little left—-The New 


61 


79 


6 CONTENTS 


Testament writers evidently felt that Christ’s miracles made 
an impression in His favour—What Nicodemus said—Peter’s 
appeal at Pentecost—Jesus Christ felt that His miracles were 
convincing—Must take New Testament as we find it—Not 
until third century any serious denial of Christ’s miracu- 
lous power—Cannot assume attitude of indifference towards 
miracles—Reasons why miracles have fallen into disrepute 
—Many spurious miracles—But these are very different 
from Christ’s miracles—Felt to-day that miracles are an 
interruption of the orderly processes of nature—Fichte’s 
statement of the problem—Henry Mansel’s answer—Man’s 
will and its control of natural forces—Seen in the garden— 
Auberlen, Huxley, Rousseau quoted—New Testament and 
science not in conflict as to miracles—True science is 
modest to-day—The mistakes of Comte and Laplace—Won- 
ders of the X-ray—Nobedy will venture to say what is 
possible or impossible—Hume on miracles—Mill’s answer 
to him—Huxley—Flammarion—Jesus was so great in 
character that great things were natural to Him—Zerah 
Colburn mathematical genius—Blind Tom musical genius— 
Culmination of miracles in resurrection of Christ—Admit it 
and it carries all the rest—Some things cannot be explained 
except by miracle—Origin of life in the world, conscience, 
conversion—Instance of Rowdy Brown............ccseeseees 


VII 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE ATONEMENT? 


Paul on the heart of the Gospel—His teaching is uni- 
form—Only one gospel in the New Testament—Example of 
apostles is good one to follow—Nothing else worth preach- 
ing—Some fell away from preaching the cross even in 
Paul’s day—Another falling away in days of Moderatism in 
Scotland—In New England Unitarianism—Same trial is on 
us again—PEvidence in recent hymnals—Other ways of sal- 
vation suggested—That Jesus Christ saves us by teaching us 
the truth—In that case He is not the only Saviour—Men 
Were not dying for teachers when Christ came—Even His 
special message is well taught in the Old Testament—Others 
pointed out the way of life—Moses—Prophets and apostles— 
Paul outdid Him in extent of work of teaching—None of 
them is presented on that account as a saviour—Suggested 
that Christ saves us by showing us how to live the truth— 
He is our example—Such an one is in a sense a saviour— 
Is that the gospel men need?—We are not simply in danger 
of falling, but already fallen—Need some one to lift us out 
of the pit into which we have fallen—Follow His example 
to be sure, but when we have done our best see more 
clearly that only hope is in mercy of God the Father, and 


94 


CONTENTS 


the sacrifice of God the Son—New Testament way of salva- 
tion is by atoning blood—God’s way of salvation must ex- 
elude none—To every creature—How Dr. Charles Berry 
learned what sort of a salvation men need—New Gospels 
Breen COMDETADIE With LUOPOIGL a cil: woe ee eins svete wis wie Dakelels 


Vill 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST? 


Willing to rest all Christian faith on the single fact of 
Christ’s resurrection—Huxley warned Christian people 
against that—But New Testament does it—In every age 
some have found the resurrection incredible—W hy ?—Resur- 
rection means not simply that life continues after death, but 
that dead body became alive again—A Christ who died and 
never came out of the grave is not the Christ of the New 
Testament—Not the Christ whom the Church has believed 
in for nineteen hundred years—Men contend that no amount 
of evidence is sufficient to prove the resurrection of Christ— 
But the question is not a complex one—Two questions re- 
quire answer—Did Jesus Christ die? Was Jesus Christ 
afterwards alive?—We often have to prove death—Proof of 
the death of Christ is complete—No deception possible— 
Died in public—By violence—At hands of professional ex- 
ecutioners—Attested by spear thrust—Proof that Jesus 
Christ came back to life equally conclusive—Testimony of 
friends, enemies, and doubters—What made sudden change 
in apostles’ demeanour?—Christianity could not come out of 
the grave in which Jesus remained dead—If Jesus Christ 
remained dead, His cause was dead—Can explain human his- 
tory only by believing in resurrection of Christ—No fact 
better established—Can get rid of it only by throwing laws 
of evidence to the winds—Only one other question—Was the 
person seen alive assuredly the one who had died?—Identi- 
fication of persons not a difficult matter—Personal experi- 
ences—If identification was a difficult matter transaction 
of business might be impossible, and procedure of courts 
difficult—Objection to use of New Testament testimony 
considered—There is none better—Resurrection of Christ 
is better attested than poisoning of Socrates or the assassi- 
nation of Julius Cesar—Happy consequences of resurrec- 
TION OTA CNTIRE 2 ute oe teeta 5 sate lstele a: Wihelede wl atdlastihe She ieeaen attra euarede 


IX 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN A FUTURE LIFE? 


When Lazarus was raised from the dead his sisters’ chief 
thought was one of joy that they had him back—But on 
such a resurrection one might construct a whole philosophy 
of life—If one could witness a resurrection he would have 


123 


8 CONTENTS 


no fear of death any more—Would see that the horrors of 
deeth had no more reality than stories of bogies—So dis- 
ciples felt after Christ arose—Most people feel no interest 
in future life—May be so with people who have suffered no 
bereavement—Lack of interest in foreign lands when we 
have no friend there—Woman whose son goes to China has 
interest in that land aroused—Life here very monotonous 
unless one has an outlook beyond the grave—Contest of 
nations for outlet to the sea—Christianity gives an outlook 
that makes life here larger and better—Life here and here- 
after are one—God means us to cherish a hope of a future 
life and intends to satisfy it—John Fiske on ‘‘ The Destiny 
of Man’’—Scientific men are more ready than ever before 
to admit that there may be another life—John Stuart Mill— 
Huxley—Sir Oliver Lodge—F. W. H. Myers—But we need 
the assurance of a revelation—Jesus Christ brought life and 
immortality to light—Hope of future life transforms life 
here—From time to time God has given His people a glimpse 
into the world beyond—Ezekiel—Apostle John—Bunyan— 
Human life hopeless without that vision of the future...... 


x 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN FUTURE PUNISHMENT? 


The character of the life after death is of prime im- 
portance—If iife here affects the hereafter we should order 
our lives accordingly—Think more about future penalties 
than rewards—No other part of Christian teaching more 
misunderstood than that about future punishment—Time 
was when future punishment was over-emphasized in 
preaching—Jonathan Edwards—To-day it is almost ignored 
—Dr. R. W. Dale’s lament that nobody is afraid of God now 
—No need to be ashamed of doctrine of future punishment 
—Bible teaches it clearly—Facts of life demand it—Incident 
given by Dr. A. H. Strong—Other incidents show sense of 
justice in criminals demands punishment—wNo part of Chris- 
tian teaching has had such reinforcement from science as fu- 
ture punishment—Clearest teaching about it is in words of 
Jesus Christ—Teaching of the Old Testament—The most ter- 
rible things about future punishment of the wicked were 
said by Christ—Question of literal fire—Christ teaches that 
punishment for unforgiven sin is certain; just; not arbitrary 
—Death does not change one’s character—Whatever charac- 
ter we have here we have hereafter—Hell not so much a 
place as a condition—Is sin punished in this world?—Wrong 
conditions here will be righted hereafter—What is the pro- 
portion of the saved and the lost?—What about the heathen 
and those who never have heard of Christ?—How long will 


135 


CONTENTS 


XI 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN OUR LORD’S RETURN 
TO THE EARTH? 


Greatest day in past history was the day of Christ’s first 
advent; greatest day of future will be the day of His 
second advent—Frequent mention of the second coming in 
the New Testament demonstrates its importance—Prevalent 
dislike of the doctrine—Attitude of Christian people of New 
Testament times—Dominant thought then—What was so 
cherished by New Testament Christians ought not be ig- 
nored to-day—Thought of His return was very dear to Jesus 
Christ—Some have tried to explain it away—Some have 
declared that it already has come to pass—Dr. W. N. Clarke 
—Mrs. Eddy—Pastor Russell—Some have said that the 
Lord’s return means death—Peter foretold these days of un- 
belief—Christ sought to keep His people in mind of His 
return—Associated it with the Lord’s Supper—New Testa- 
ment says clearly that Christ will return in person—Visibly, 
—Suddenly—Must world first be converted?—He will come 
gloriously—Time of coming not revealed—Fact of return 
put beyond all dispute—The promise that Christ will return 
is very satisfying to all our instincts—Career of our Lord 
in this world is not yet complete—What is the use of this 
doctrine?—Impels to activity—Sometimes has. opposite 
effect—Meant to comfort and inspire—Great leaders of the 
Church have cherished the doctrine of Christ’s return—Mar- 
tin Luther—John Calvin—John Knox—The Wesleys—Rich- 
ard Baxter—Exhortation to watch—Christian people eager 
for Christ’s return—Why He delays... ccucccidedecccccssesee 


XIT 
THE ALMIGHTINESS OF FAITH 


Jesus Christ attributes to faith almost incredible power— 
His frequent assurances of it are impressive—Often find 
the meaning of a proposition by putting it to a practical 
test—Afraid to so test the text about mountain-moving 
faith—Wish people would use Bible naturally—Faith as a 
grain of mustard seed—dAllusion is to size of seed—Meant 
to imply almightiness of even a little faith—Can do im- 
possibilities—Mountains always used in a figurative sense— 
Jews spoke of mighty men as mountain movers—Would 
have spoken so of Roosevelt, of Marshall Foch, of Napoleon 
—Some things impossible even to God—Dr. H. G. Weston’s 
statement—Common sense needed in interpreting Scripture 
—Mirabeau and Pitt on impossibilities—Primitive Chris- 
tianity a religion of power—Early Christians sensationalists 
—Ought not be satisfied unless the Church is now impress- 


160 


10 CONTENTS 


ing the world—Did so at Pentecost—In Protestant Refor- 
mation—Great Awakening—In Finney’s and Moody’s re- 
vival—Demonstrations of power by Church ought not to 
be unusual—Church cannot live on past history—If Church 
lacks power the world rightly ignores her—Church like her 
Lord is supernatural—EHach Christian should have ideal of 
mighty faith and fervent devotion for his own church—Is 
Church’s power declining?—The might of faith demonstrated 
in Wesleyan revival and in the rise of the modern mission- 
ary movement at the haystack in Williamstown............ 176 


{ 
THE IMPORTANCE OF BELIEF 


“This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he 
hath sent.”—JouHn 6: 29. 


N every page of the New Testament tremendous 
() emphasis is laid upon the importanee of belief. 
It is the only way by which we come into vital 
relation with Jesus Christ. John says that Christ ‘‘gave 
power to become sons of God to them that believed on 
his name.’’ Belief is the invariable condition of receiv- 
ing forgiveness of one’s sins. The Lord Jesus always 
asked for belief as a prerequisite for bestowing the 
benefits that came through His power to work miracles. 
Without belief in Him one is impotent; with belief one is 
omnipotent. ‘‘ All things are possible to him that be- 
lieveth.’’ Everywhere the Bible indicates that not only 
all power is dependent on our believing but all peace of 
mind as well. Near the end of the epistle to the Romans 
Paul says: ‘‘Now the God of hope fill you with all joy 
and peace in believing.’’ Without confident belief there 
is no such thing as buoyancy of spirit or serenity of 
mind. 

It is so even in the ordinary concerns of life. Some 
things a man must be absolutely sure of if he is to have 
any peace or happiness. In business a man must feel 
sure of the integrity of the people to whom he sells goods 
if he is to rest at night. ‘To promote that necessary feel- 
ing of confidence all sorts of devices are made—from 
the companies that make it their business to know the 

11 


12 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


reliability of all tradesmen and furnish you information 
about them, to the companies that insure you against 
loss through unecollectable bills. Just as soon as con- 
fidence fails in the business world, panic comes, and in- 
deseribable disaster, and the only cure for such a con- 
dition is a restoration of confidence. 

If you are not sure of the strength of the government 
that guarantees the banknotes you have in your purse 
your money becomes almost worthless, and you can buy 
a bushel of its notes for a few cents. During the World 
War, German marks which normally would be worth 
about twenty-five cents apiece, were worth so little that 
you had to use a microscope to discover any value at all 
in them. Only as men are confident of the stability and 
strength of a government, will the notes which that 
government issues be of sufficient value to be used in 
legitimate business. 

You know how essential a thing confidence is in the 
home. Husband and wife must feel no uncertainty 
about each other’s faithfulness and devotion. Cesar’s 
wife must even be above suspicion. As soon as the 
slightest degree of uncertainty about each other creeps 
in, the home is in turmoil, and there is unhappiness and 
coldness and estrangement, with all the tragedy which 
that means for many hearts. The couple may be true 
to each other in every respect. Each may be conscious 
of purity and rectitude unimpaired. Each may mourn 
over the loss of the other’s affection. Everything in the 
world may be exactly right in their relations with each 
other. But if any suspicion that things are not right 
thrusts itself into their minds, the home is ruined. You 
must not only have things right but you must feel sure 
that they are right or else you are distracted in mind, 
and distressed in heart. 


THE IMPORTANCE OF BELIEF 13 


Of course a man must have some assurance of the truth 
of things on which he rests the hopes of his soul or he 
will know nothing of the peace that is promised to Chris- 
tian people. Yet it must be admitted that it is the very 
things on which we have been resting our souls that are 
called in question to-day. The attacks on Christian 
truth that have been made from Christian pulpits re- 
cently and in our theological seminaries, and which have 
aroused such profound public interest are not attacks on 
non-essentials. They are attacks on the very founda- 
tions of our faith. And though the men who have made 
these attacks declare they still hold their Christian faith, 
what they have said has without doubt resulted in the 
loss of faith to many another. And a great loss that is, 
the loss of faith. There is no other loss that one can 
suffer half so bad as that. 

Loss of fortune, that is a dreadful thing. Loss of 
health, that is very sad. Loss of reputation, that is 
calamitous. Loss of friends, that is sometimes heart- 
breaking. But to lose one’s faith is worse than all these 
other losses put together. Better have all your money 
slip away from you so that you have not a dollar to your 
name than to lose your faith. Better lose your place in 
the business world so that you have to grub along in 
hardship from day to day, than to lose your faith. Bet- 
ter have your last friend turn his back on you and feel 
yourself alone in an unfriendly world, than to lose your 
faith. Better have your health utterly break down so 
that you linger along from day to day in a sort of liv- 
ing death, than to lose your faith. There is no other loss 
that for a moment compares with this. Loss of faith is a 
loss unspeakable. 

In every age and in every land there have been some 
unhappy souls who have sneered at faith. Some people 


14 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


have an insane hatred of ereeds. Such people we have 
in plenty to-day. They act as though it is a crime to 
have a creed. But we make a tremendous mistake if we 
underestimate the value of creeds. Every one but a fool 
has a creed. We have creeds about everything. We 
have a business creed. You could not manage your office 
if you had not. You have a medical creed, and so when 
you are sick you send for a physician of your own 
school, allopathic, homeopathic, hydropathic, or what not. 
There are creeds of art and science. And there are also 
very rightly religious creeds. What folly it is to say that 
religion, the most important concern of life, is the only 
thing on which one should not have a definite belief, or if 
he has such a belief, should not say what it is. 

The early Church required each applicant for member- 
ship to make some statement of his faith. Baptism was 
administered only on profession of faith. The eunuch, 
whom Philip met seemingly by chance in the wilderness, 
asked for baptism and Philip said at once, ‘‘If thou be- 
lievest.’? And the eunuch responded at once, ‘‘I believe 
that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.’’ The Church it- 
self had clear convictions that bound the members to- 
gether, and naturally enough in admitting new members 
they wished them to believe the same things and to be 
devoted to the same ends. If you join a masonic lodge 
you are expected to assent to its principles. That is fair. 
You are expected to give assurances of your loyalty. 
That is right. You do not go into a masonic lodge with 
the intention of changing everything. Masons value the 
ancient landmarks, and seek to preserve them. That is 
‘true of every organization that I know anything about. 
You cannot be admitted to membership in any of them 
unless you come prepared to agree to its principles and 
abide by its rules. The Church is the only institution I 


THE IMPORTANCE OF BELIEF 15 


know of in which men claim the right to membership 
while they repudiate its foundation principles and seek 
to bring about its overthrow. Christian schools are the 
only ones of which I have any knowledge in which men 
claim the right to teach things that are subversive of the 
school’s existence. It is not according to reason that it 
should be so. The early Church was entirely right when 
it required a clear profession of one’s faith of every 
person who wished to enter its fellowship. 

I confess that I have little use for those people who 
are always saying that it makes no difference what a man 
believes if he only lives aright. Such a statement could 
be made only by one who is slovenly in his thinking or 
careless in his speech, or else by a man who is bewildered. 
For a man eannot possibly live aright unless in certain 
essential things he believes aright. A man’s creed is to 
him what a tail is to a bird. <A bird’s tail is given to 
it to balance itself with and to steer itself with. Ifa 
bird has no tail it totters when it tries to stand still, and 
it cannot go straight when it is on the wing. So aman 
is wobbly, he is unsteady in his thinking and crooked in 
his life, unless he is held to truth and righteousness by 
certain definite beliefs that are dearer to him than life 
itself. 

‘We are living in an age when strength of conviction 
has declined. Men everywhere are showing themselves 
disciples of, Lord Bacon. When Lord Bacon, who has 
been lauded by many as having had the mightiest intel- 
lect of the human race, was asked how he was able to 
retain office under two such different sovereigns as Queen 
Elizabeth and James J, he is said to have replied: ‘*By 
imitating the willow instead of the oak.’’? There are 
multitudes of people like that among us to-day, who are 
simply disciples of expediency. There is nothing so 


16 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


sacred to them that they cannot bend it into conformity 
to the special requirements of any place or time. When 
they are at Rome they always do as the Romans do. 
Like the chameleon they are always able to assume the 
colour of their surroundings. ‘They have no fixed char- 
acter. Principles they know nothing about. Convie- 
tions have no place in their make-up. Like the ancient 
Pyrrho their judgments are always in suspense. Their 
Opinions change with every shift in the popular notions. 

/ But really there are no more disagreeable people than 
those pliable souls who make it a point of always agree- 
ing with you, and who would rather sell their souls than 
express dissent from any one in authority. | The name 
of such people is legion. They are people who never 
take a stand for anything. They know nothing that is 
worth taking a stand for. Their whole purpose is to 
wriggle through this world in as slick a way as possible, 
taking as little trouble as they can, and seeing that their 
own hides are not scratched. Miserable people they are, 
shifty, characterless. It is a puzzle to me how God ever 
ean do anything with them, and they are not worth the 
devil wasting time on them. Their character is always 
plastic, taking its shape from the pressure brought to 
bear upon it at the time, and never hardening into fixed- 
ness. They always agree with you when you are with 
them, and ten minutes afterwards when they are with 
some one who entirely disagrees with you they agree with 
him. And if they happen to be with you and your op- 
ponent at the same time they take no stand with either, 
or else try to agree with both at the same time and so 
make a disgraceful straddle. Such a man will, like a 
well-known Baptist professor, lead a congregation de- 
voutly in prayer as though it meant something, and will 
make it a part of his teaching in a theological seminary 


THE IMPORTANCE OF BELIEF 1t 


and print it in one of his books that ‘‘the only prayer 
which we have any moral right to offer is precisely the 
prayer which after all we ourselves must answer.’’ Or 
if he is a leader in one of the ereedal churches he will 
stand in the pulpit leading the people in the recitation 
of a creed every sentence of which he will admit he be- 
lieves to be false. 

Now to be sure it is the very genius of Protestantism 
to recognize the right of revolt against the authority of 
man-made creeds. We do not acknowledge the right of 
any body of Christian people to formulate and impose 
their creed upon us. But we repudiate the authority of 
man-made creeds beeause we bow to the authority of a 
God-given Book. Holding this basic doctrine that the 
Bible was written by men divinely inspired and recog- 
nizing its authority over us we reserve the right to sit 
in judgment on all creeds that have been made by men, 
testing them by what the Word of God says. But people 
who hold to such convictions are not loose in their views 
of Christian truth. The fact is that the simple accept- 
ance of the Bible as God’s Word, authoritative in faith 
and life, means the acceptance of a pretty definite body 
of doctrine. 

There are some who declare that definite convictions 
of truth are not needed as a bond of fellowship in mak- 
ing a church. I knew an eminent pastor of a Congre-| 
gational church in the suburbs of New York who said) 
to a company of Unitarian people who were thinking 
of building a church of their own, ‘‘ You do not need to 
have your own church. You will feel quite at home 
among us.’’ He said also to the Baptists of his ecom- 
munity who were thinking of building a meeting-house, 
*“*You do not need to build your own chureh. Come 
with us. You will feel entirely at home.’’ I cannot 


18 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


conceive what sort of preaching they could have from 
that pulpit that would suit those who revered Jesus 
Christ as God manifest in the flesh and would suit also 
those who regarded Him as a man and nothing more. 
Yet it is the contention to-day that people of every 
variety of view should be able to hold fellowship in the 
same church. You may believe that Jesus Christ was 
supernaturally born as the Scriptures say or that He was 
simply the natural son of Joseph and Mary; that the 
Seriptures were divinely inspired or that they were 
merely the product of men’s thinking; that Christ died 
as our substitute on the cross or that He simply died as 
a martyr to His faith as many another man has done; 
that Christ will come back to this world according to 
His promise or that He was deceived about His return, 
being misled by the notions that prevailed among His 
people at that time. It makes no difference, the same 
church ought to be big enough to include people of all 
degrees of faith or lack of faith. 

It may be that there are churches that never have 
made any confession of faith but I have no knowledge 
of such a church. It is ineoneeivable that an ecclesi- 
astical council of any sort would recognize as a church 
a group of people who were unwilling to make a state- 
ment of what they believe. Men cannot walk together 
unless they be agreed. The first impulse to unite in a 
working or worshipping body comes from the ascer- 
tained agreement in the constituent members’ faith. 
‘Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick thinks you can found an 

“acceptable church with no ereed but ‘‘Thou shalt love 
the Lord thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul 
and strength, and thy neighbour as thyself.’? He 
says that he wants a church that Abraham Lincoln 
could join, and Abraham Lincoln said he could join a 


THE IMPORTANCE OF BELIEF 19 


church that had no creed but that great summing up of 
the old law. No man can outdo me in the reverence I 
feel for the character and the memory of Abraham Lin- 
coln. But when I wish to know how a Christian church 
should be constituted I do not go to Abraham Lincoln, 
but to Jesus Christ. He asked of every member of His 
Church more than the keeping of the ancient law. Of 
a young man who said that he had kept all the law He 
asked more. He said to him, ‘‘One thing thou lackest. 
Go sell all that thou hast and come and follow me.’’ 
You cannot become a Christian of any sort except by 
an obedient relation to Jesus Christ. ‘‘Follow me’’ is 
the invariable command of the Saviour. In Moses’ law is 
no profession of faith in Christ, no vow to follow Him. 
That fine summing up of the law of Moses might serve 
as an excellent basis for a Jewish synagogue, but not for 
a Christian chureh, hardly for a Unitarian church. 
Jesus Christ’s constant insistence was that men should 
believe on Him. On every page of the New Testament 
it is insisted again and again, with a reiteration that is 
impressive, that men must believe on Christ. 

Men are acting to-day as though an intelligent faith 
in Christ is of little account. They bid us do the works 
of God, that is sufficient, they say. But Jesus Christ 
said differently. When some men came to Him expressly 
asking what they should do that they might work the 
works of God, He said, ‘‘ This is the work of God that ye 
should believe on him whom he hath sent.’’ Our de- 
nominational leaders in every church have been saying 
for years, ‘‘Stop talking about what we believe. Let us 
do our work unitedly.’’ No doubt Jesus Christ would 
say. to them to-day as He said to the Jews of old, ‘‘Do 
our work? This is the work of God, that ye believe.’’ 

You will remember that on another occasion Jesus 


20 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


Christ pictured men saying to Him at the last day, 
‘‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name; and 
in thy name have cast out demons; and in thy name done 
many wonderful works?’’? Then He declares that He will 
say unto them, ‘‘I never knew you. Depart from me ye 
that work iniquity.’? Very evidently social service can- 
not be taken in place of belief, if we are to take the 
word of Jesus Christ about it. 

I was greatly interested during a visitation of schools 
which I made a few years ago in talks which I had with 
many of the students. It was interesting, sadly so, to 
see in how soft and dilettante a way they handled truth, 
especially religious truth. A young woman in one of our 
western colleges said she could not see why the de- 
nomination was so disturbed about what was being 
taught in the schools, ‘‘for,’’ said she, ‘‘what I believe 
has nothing to do with my religion.’? That sounded 
both ludicrous and shocking when it was first spoken, 
but on reflection one can see that that is substantially 
what many of our religious leaders are saying to-day: 
‘*Oh, stop talking about what we believe. That has noth- 
ing to do with our religion. Let each one believe what he 
pleases. Religion is to finish this task of ours.”’ 

A few years ago a missionary society of one of our 
great religious denominations accepted a large gift whose 
income the donor said should be used only for the sup- 
port of missionaries who accepted such simple articles of 
faith as the inspiration of the Scriptures, the deity of 
Christ, a vicarious atonement, the bodily resurrection of 
Christ, and the certainty of His coming again. One 
would think that any Christian would agree to such 
simple conditions as that. No, to the surprise of many 
those simple conditions threw the denomination into 
tumult. All over the land the matter was discussed as 


THE IMPORTANCE OF BELIEF 21 


to whether a missionary society ought to accept gifts on 
the express condition that the income be used to propa- 
gate the faith which we now hold, and which we have 
held with firmness for nineteen hundred years, and all 
because such a statement of faith might prove a burden 
to some. And lest the discussion of what we believe 
might prove disturbing to the denominational work, the 
president of the general denominational convention sent 
out an appeal that there should be no discussion of the 
fundamental articles of our faith, but rather that all the 
members of the churches should get together and do the 
things which as a denomination they had planned to do. 
It is the old plausible, but fallacious cry that it makes 
no difference what we believe if we only do what is right. 
It shoves even faith in Jesus Christ into the background 
and declares that the main thing after all is that we 
make the world better by ameliorating the conditions in 
which multitudes of our fellow-men are living, heal the 
sick, feed the hungry, teach the ignorant, and so on, and 
if we do these things our faith will take care of itself. 
The Bible does not teach any such notion as that. 
Jesus Christ does not teach that. He put it the other 
way about. He said, ‘‘This is the work of God that ye 
believe on him whom he hath sent.’’ Jesus Christ said 
that our belief, especially our belief in Him, is primary 
and all important. All the work in the world will not 
amount to anything if first of all you do not believe on 
Him. If your belief is Tight 2 all the rest will take care 


of itself.. If your belief is right, all the work that you /\ U 


ought to do will be done. The real reason why our 
churches are baffled in their work of soul saving, and our 
missionary sccieties have failed year after year in rais- 
ing the money needed for their work is that our religious 
leaders in all the denominations have been pooh-poohing 


22 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


that necessity of belief in Christ and have been refusing 
to state what their faith is. Such leaders, if they had 
been at the Diet of Worms where Martin Luther stood 
on trial for his faith, and thought he might have to die 
for what he believed, would have whispered to him, 
*“Don’t be a fool, Luther. What difference does it make 
what a man believes? ’? Luther thought it did make a 
difference, and so when he had stated what he believed 
he set himself and said, ‘‘Here I stand. I cannot do 
otherwise. God help me! ’’ 

Set over against a man like Luther a representative 
man of our age, Ernst Renan, the distinguished French 
church historian, of whom it is said that he had ‘‘an 
easy tolerance born of the conviction that no faith was 
worth a struggle, much less a martyrdom.’’ How ad- 
mirably Renan represents those people among us who do 
not wish us to speak of the fundamentals of our faith 
lest some be disturbed. What a contemptible character 
he is who believes nothing very positively and is willing 
to change that faith any time at all in order to keep 
the peace and make things pleasant. Put such a man 
as that alongside of Paul whose sufferings for Christ 
were so many and so varied that they cannot be eata- 
logued. How impossible it would be to put the name of 
such a shifty creature in the list of the heroes of the 
faith which we find in the epistle to the Hebrews. How 
the name of such a creature fades away before the names 
of the Christian martyrs that make the history of the 
world splendid! 

I confess I do not wish any one to preach to me about 
what he does not believe. I do not wish any one to 
preach to me on any subject about which he is simply 
in the investigating stage. I am like the Swedish church 
sexton who said to his pastor, ‘‘Too many preachers say. 


THE IMPORTANCE OF BELIEF 23 


‘IT tink, I tink,’ when they ought to say ‘I know because 
God says so.’ ’’ I do not want for my minister one who 
is a mere question mark. I want him to have done his 
investigating before, he goes into the pulpit, and the 
things he announces there I wish him to be certain of.__, 
If I go to a strange land I do not engage as my guide | 
one who is just groping his way about. I put myself | 
in the care of one who knows all the nooks and crannies _., 
of the streets, and the buildings and the ways of the 
people. If Ll am sick I do not put myself under the care 
of a man who doubts whether there is such a thing as 
disease, and who thinks it makes little difference what 
prescription he gives, all being equally good or equally 
bad, the only sure thing being that they are equally 
profitable to him. I want my physician to have at his 
command the assured results of hundreds of years of 
observation of disease and of experiments in remedies. I 
do not want to entrust my life to some one who is simply 
guessing about things and who knows no more about dis- 
eases and their cure than I myself do. And when _I 
go to church and my soul is full of needs, I do not. wish 
to listen to. a. man who i is bewildered i in his thinking, and 
uncertain in his faith. I often think of a man, a very 
intelligent man, a college graduate, a successful man of 
business, who told me that he went to church one Sun- 
day morning in New York. He heard a sermon on 
prayer. He said pathetically, ‘‘I went into that church 
a praying man. I came out wondering whether there is 
any use in praying.’’ It was my delightful task to lead 
him back to faith in a prayer-hearing and a prayer- 
answering God, but I could not help having some 
thoughts about that preacher who was set for the de- 
fense of the Gospel, who was using his place and power to 
undermine the faith men already had. Lord Macaulay 


24. CAN WE BELIEVE? 


was right in exhorting preachers to tell him the things 
they believed, and not to tell him their doubts, because 
he had doubts enough of his own. 

There is no possibility of winning battles for Christ if 
we falter in making the eall to battle. We must go out 
with an air of authority and with evident confidence in 
our cause. When an army feels that it has little or noth- 
ing worth fighting for, the battle line wavers and defeat 
is speedy and complete. There is no slightest chance of 
our conquering the world for Jesus Christ if our faith 
in Him is uncertain. You may depend upon it, it was 
no uncertain faith in Christ that took Adoniram Jud- 
son to Burma, or Robert Morrison to China, or Henry 
Martyn to India, or David Mackay to Uganda, or John 
G. Paton to the South Seas, or Wilfred Grenfell to 
Labrador. Since David Livingstone led the way to the 
dark continent more than two thousand men have laid 
down their lives as missionaries to Africa. They were 
martyrs to the savagery of men and to the cruel climate. 
They were happy in their martyrdom since it was for 
Christ they did it. But they never would have gone 
and it was a blunder and a crime to let them go, if there 
is no more in the Christian faith than some preachers 
and teachers to-day allow. 

The only thing that drove Paul into every land of his 
time, and enabled him to bear sufferings severe and 
countless was the fact that he was inspired by a con- 
fident faith. He was able to say ‘‘I know, I know, I 
know’’ concerning the truth he proclaimed to men. Paul 
was so unfaltering in his convictions that he could stand 
before Nero, the emperor of the world, without a tremor 
of fear. He had back of him greater authority than that 
of Nero. He seemed as he stood before the Roman 
tribunal to be nothing but a prisoner, but as he stood 


THE IMPORTANCE OF BELIEF 25 


before an earthly king, he represented the King of kings. 
He was in bonds, but he was an ambassador in bonds 
for the Son of God. That is the sort of man that moves 
the world. He is the only sort of man who can move 
the world. No great moral or religious movement ever 
has been led by any man except one of positive faith, and 
none ever will be. A man who has unwavering faith in 
the Master he represents and in the truth he stands for, 
eannot but be an intrepid man. The cause he fights for 
is sure of ultimate triumph whatever disaster comes 
temporarily to him. With Arthur Hugh Clough he can 
say: 
‘It fortifies my soul to know 

That though I perish, Truth is so; 

That howsoe’er I stray and range, 

Whate’er I do, Thou dost not change. 


I steadier step when I recall 
That, if I slip, thou dost not fall.’” 


II 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN GOD? 


“Ve believe in God.”—JOHN 14:1. 


O man should speak of God without thinking. 
N And when a man thinks about God it does not 
make him talkative. It fills his soul with awe 
and imposes silence on his lips. To feel one’s self in the 
presence of God is to hear the voice that spoke to Moses 
from the burning bush saying: ‘‘Put off thy shoes from 
off thy feet for the place whereon thou standest is holy 
ground.’’ 

The followers of Mohammed never tread on a chance 
piece of paper that lies on the ground lest the name of 
Allah be written on it. Even they with their false re- 
ligion know better than to play familiar with Him before 
whom the archangels veil their faces. Sir Isaac Newton 
was in the habit of uncovering his head whenever he 
heard the name of God mentioned. The British phi- 
losopher, Robert Boyle, never pronounced the name of 
God without a perceptible pause. They set us an example 
well worth our following. 

It is a sense of the greatness of the subject that makes 
preachers hesitate to speak on such a subject as ‘‘The 
Fact and Meaning of God.’’ You might search through 
a large library of modern sermons and not find it treated 
once. A theme like that belongs to the great preachers 
of the past. Jonathan Edwards would be equal to it. 
Francis Wayland also. Canon Liddon might appro- 
priately treat it in one of his University Sermons. Spur- 

26 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN GOD? 27 


geon would have revelled in it. And yet if one ap- 
proaches it in a right spirit, smaller men may under- 
take to say something about it. 

Rowland Hill was once trying to convey to his hearers 
some idea of the greatness of God’s love. Suddenly he _ 
stopped and raising his eyes to heaven, he exclaimed: ‘‘T 
am unable to reach the lofty theme. Yet 1 do not think 
that the smallest fish that swims in the ocean ever com- 
plains of the ocean’s vastness. So it is with me. With 
my puny powers I can plunge with delight into a sub- 
ject the immensity of which I shall never be able to / 
comprehend.’’ ze 

Whether the pulpit is discussing this subject or not 
men of the world are doing so. On a recent trip that I 
made to the West as I left New York, I observed a man 
reading the leading editorial of a newspaper that is 
recognized as ‘‘yellow’’ from one end of the land to the 
other. The editorial began, ‘‘What is God? You have 
asked that question. Every human being has asked it. 
The heathen has answered the question with an idol, the 
wise man with an ideal.’’ 

Robert W. Chambers recently wrote a novel in which 
through one of its characters he discusses the nature of 
God. What he says might not help us here, but the fact 
that he discusses the subject at all is important. That 
book the newsbey was peddling through the train on 
which I rode. 

On that same trip I bought two magazines. One of 
them was The American Magazine. It contained an 
article about God by Dr. Frank Crane, in which he dis- 
cussed the subject as you would wish a man to do wha 
had some sense of God. The other was The North Ameri. 
can Review, in which was an article by John Burroughs, 
in which he declared plainly that in all his searches for 


28 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


God in nature he was disappointed and came out of his 
search at the very point where he entered upon the 
trail. 

I am not particularly interested just now in the con- 
clusions these men reached. This is the impressive thing, 
that a common, even a vulgar newspaper, a serious novel, 
a popular magazine, and a standard Review, almost the 
only pieces of literature 1 came upon in a railway jour- 
ney of two thousand miles, should each of them have 
contained a serious discussion of the existence and the 
character of God. Clearly enough men of the world are 
facing this subject even if the preachers are not. 

- The Bible does not tell men that there is a God. It 
never makes any argument to prove it. It assumes that 
men believe it. Its purpose is to give men right views 
of God, and to tell them how they may come into right 
relations with God. Cicero long ago said, ‘‘There is no 
people so wild and savage as not to have believed in a 
God, even if they have been unacquainted with His 
nature.’’ If an uninspired man had been writing the 
Bible it is likely that at the very beginning he would 
have proceeded to demonstrate the existence of God, as 
practically all text-books of theology do. But the Bible 
does no such thing. It assumes that God exists, and then 
proceeds to tell us something of what He has done, what 
His character is, and what He expects of us, His crea- 
tures. 

It is a singular thing that the Bible says nothing about 
the wickedness of not believing in God. It simply says 
that not to do so is foolish. It says ‘‘The fool hath said 
_dn his heart “There is no God.’ ’’ It intimates that be- 
lieving in God is not so much a matter of piety as of 
~ common sense. It declares that men ought not need a 
revelation from heaven to convince them that there is 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN GOD? 29 


aGod. Their reason ought to suggest that to them. Men 
are blamed for worshipping false gods because their 
reason should have told them better. They are urged to 
use their reason in order that they may discern the true 
God. Paul says that God’s eternal power and Godhead 
are clearly seen in the things that He has made, so that 
even those who have no Bible are without excuse for not 
discerning Him. The man who thinks can find abundant 
proofs of God’s existence wherever he turns his eyes. 
Napoleon overheard two officers arguing about God’s 
existence, one for it, the other against. The emperor 
stopped, waved his hand toward the starry sky, and 
said, ‘‘Gentlemen, if there is no God, will you tell me 
who made all those.’’ Galileo, in prison for his advanced 
thought about things, was asked why he persisted in be- 
lieving in God. He pointed to a bit of broken straw on. 
the floor of his cell and said, ‘‘If I had no other reason — 
to believe in the wisdom and goodness of God I could. 
argue them out from that straw on the floor of this” 
dungeon.’’ You are familiar with the story of the Arab 
who was guiding a French skeptic across the desert. 
Now and then the Arab would spread his mat on the 
sand and kneel down and pray. That irritated the 
Frenchman, and once when the Arab got up from his 
prayer he said to him, ‘‘How do you know there is a 
God?’’ The Arab replied, ‘‘How do I know that a man 
and a camel passed our tent last night? I know it by 
their footprints on the sand. You want to know how I 
know there is a God. Look at that sunset. Is that the 
footprint of aman?’’ That is good reasoning. You can 
find God’s signature in every muscle of your body and 
in every hair of your head if you are willing to look for 
it. There is not a leaf, nor a flower, nor a dewdrop 
but bears the marks of God’s hands, and every common 


30 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


bush is afire with God’s presence, if you have the eyes 
to see it. Away back in David’s time, thoughtful men 
felt that God spoke to them through the works of His 
hands. David sang, ‘‘The heavens declare the glory of 
God and the firmament showeth his handiwork.’’ He 
who says there is no God says in effect that the universe 
made itself; that there was no Creator; that no mind 
governs it; that the world rushes on uncared for; and 
that as it made itself, and goes of itself, so it may stop 
and fall to pieces of itself. Is there any particular intel- 
ligence displayed in such a judgment as that? 

In similar fashion our esthetic sensibilities and our 
moral convictions, our ideals of beauty, and goodness, 
and truth, and righteousness, drive us to a belief in God 
as the source of them and their fulfillment. As Victor 
Cousin said they are ‘‘the mysterious ladder on which 
the soul can mount from the finite to the infinite.’’ 
Unless it can so mount the human soul is the most 
unsatisfied thing in the universe. St. Augustine spoke 
truly when he said, ‘‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, O 
_ God, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”’ 
Our unsatisfied yearnings for God are a proof that He 
exists unless nature has outraged us in making us. 
What men have needed to know for their guidance in 
right doing God has told them either in the instincts 
He put within them or in the works of nature about 
them which He gave them intelligence to interpret. 
What they could not learn from the things about them, 
—how they could be saved from sin,—He taught them 
by express revelation. 

What a man thinks about God shapes all his other 
thinking. A woman once said to Professor Benjamin 
Jowett of Balliol College, Oxford, ‘‘Dr. Jowett, what 
do you think of God? ’’ Professor Jowett looked at her 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN GOD? ol 


very seriously and said, ‘‘It matters very little what I 
think of God, but it matters a great deal what God 
thinks of me.’’ To be sure that is true. It is vastly 
more important what God thinks of us than what we 
think of Him. But after all that answer is bright and 
evasive rather than satisfactory. It does make some 
difference what we think of God, not to God perhaps, 
but certainly to us. For what a man thinks of God 
shapes his whole life. 

It has been said that you can judge the value of a 
religion by what it thinks of man. But there is some- 
thing more fundamental than that. The value of a re- 
ligion depends on the truth and the sufficiency of its 
idea of God. If we start with a little God we have a 
little religion quite insufficient to meet the great needs 
of a man’s heart. You cannot erect a big building on a 
little base. Some of you have been in the East India 
Museum in London. They have there an elaborately 
earved idol from India, that has twelve hands and in 
every hand a different instrument of cruelty. A man 
who believes in and worships that sort of a god could not 
possibly be the same kind of a man as the man who be- 
lieves in the God whom the Bible proclaims to be ‘‘merci- 
ful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in good- 
ness and truth.’’ 

There have been men who professed to know all about 
God. They have undertaken to define His attributes and 
to announce with precision what His decrees are, and 
in their sermons and text-books they have made what 
we might call a map of Christ’s nature as sharply de- 
fined as any map we have of New York State. There 
have been other men who were as sure that they knew 
nothing about God as the first were that they knew all 
about Him. They have gone.so far as to say that we 


o2 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


do not know and cannot know that there is a God. The 
one set of men are blind through conceit, the other blind 
through their impenetrable ignorance. They are like the 
two men who were in a blind asylum. One was a Cornish 
miner, the other a Swiss shepherd. The Swiss shepherd 
asked the Cornish miner, ‘‘ How came you to be blind?’’ 
and he answered, ‘*Too much darkness. I lived in the 
mine so long that my sight gave way.’’ The miner then 
said to the Swiss shepherd, ‘‘How came you to be 
blind?’’ and the shepherd answered, ‘‘Too much light. 
I lived on the snow mountains. The glare was so great 
that my sight gave way.’’ In one ease blindness came 
_ from using the eyes too much, and in the other case from 
using them too little. It is precisely so in our knowledge 
of God. The man who thinks to know all about God is 
soon lost in mysteries of glory far beyond his compre- 
hension. The man who resolves to know nothing about 
God is equally lost in the fogs of his own stubbornness 
and stupidity. 

Every man paints his own picture of God. Speak 
God’s name in the ears of a thousand different men and 
a different conception is aroused in the mind of each 
one. What we are determines what we see. When the 
fool says, ‘‘There is no God,’’ you are not surprised at 
that. That is just what you would expect a fool to say. 
But it proves nothing except his own lack of capacity, 
that is all. 

_ Emerson told us of an Abolition meeting in Boston in 
which a politician railed at Sojourner Truth. When the 
man sat down the tall black woman arose and tapping 
her head very significantly she said, ‘‘Honey, I would 
tole yeh suthin’, but I sees yeh ain’t got nuthin’ to 
earry it home in.’’ The old negress spoke a profound 
fruth. It is a man’s capacity always that determines his 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN GOD? 33 


conception of truth. If a man’s brain is short, his views 
of truth are short, too. 

Children are more apt to picture God to themselves 
than grown-up people are. The pictures of God that we 
conjure up for ourselves in our childhood seem grotesque 
to us in our manhood. Any representation of God must 
seem so, though an adult conceive it and a master hand 
execute it. The European churches, as you know, are 
full of pictures of God, and feeble representations they 
are, even when the hand of Michael Angelo drew them. 
They present an old man with a great flowing white 
beard. Sargent’s picture of God in the Boston Library 
gives us a gigantic man, with flowing robes and big 
boots. I suppose that is the best one can do when a 
visible sketch of God is demanded. But the mind ean 
conceive a picture such as the hand can never paint. 
And this is the way the mind goes about the work of 
constructing its picture of God. We find man at his 
best and purest and noblest estate. We invest him with 
all possible attributes of goodness and greatness. And 
then we enlarge our ideal man until he is infinite, and 
that is our notion of God. And that method of con- 
ceiving God has its warrant in the Bible, for we are told 
there that man was made in the image of God. But if 
we follow that plan our God will inevitably reflect what 
we ourselves are. And so as some one has said, 


“The Ethiop’s God has Ethiop’s lips, 
Black cheek and woolly hair; 
And the Grecian God a Grecian face, 
Keen-eyed, cold and fair.’’ 


The glass through which we see God is darkened and 
distorted by what we ourselves are, and the shadow of 
our imperfections falls on Him. 


34 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


And so God determined to give us a picture of Him- 
self that is perfect. He sent into the world One who 
was ‘‘the express image of his person.’’ He came down 
and dwelt among us in the person of His Son. God was 
so really in Jesus Christ that the Master could say, ‘‘He 

that hath seen me hath seen the Father.’’ In the Rospig- 
liosi Palace in Rome is Guido Reni’s famous fresco 

“ “The Aurora,’’? a work unequalled in that period for 
nobility of line and poetry of colour. It is painted on a 
lofty ceiling. As you stand on the pavement and look 
up at it, your neck stiffens, your head grows dizzy, and 
the figures become hazy and indistinct. And so the 
owner of the palace has placed a broad mirror near the 

_ floor. In it the picture is reflected and you may sit 
down before it and study the wonderful work in com- 

-—fort. Precisely that Jesus Christ does for us when we 

_ try to get some notion of God. He is the mirror of 
Deity. He is the express image of God’s person. He 
interprets God to our dull hearts. In Him God becomes 
visible and intelligible to us. We cannot by any amount 
of searching find out God. The more we try the more 
we are bewildered. Then Jesus Christ appears. He is 
God stooping down to our level and He enables our 
feeble thoughts to get some real hold on God Himself. 
In one of Mrs. Deland’s stories, the boy David looking 
on a picture of Jesus Christ said, ‘‘Is it a good photo- 
graph of God?’’ The Bible says it is. ‘‘He is the ex- 
press image of God’s person.’’ 

A sick woman said to Richard Cecil, the famous Eng- 
lish preacher, ‘‘Sir, I have no notion of God. I can 
form no notion of Him. You talk to me about Him, but 
I cannot get a single idea that means anything to me.’’ 
**But,’’ said Mr. Cecil, ‘‘you know how to think of Jesus 
Christ as He was here in the world. That is God.’’ 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN GOD? 35 


*‘Ah, sir,’’ she said, ‘‘that gives me something to lay 
hold upon. There I rest. I understand God in His Son.’’ 

And yet I have often wondered what notion of God 
we have after all God’s efforts to make Himself known 
to us. Is there any other name which to most people is 
so empty of pleasant suggestion as the name of God? 
Here and there, it is true, have been rare souls with such 
a knowledge of God that to them His name was above 
every other name in heaven and on earth. But take 
people in general. Take congregations of people like 
those we meet with in worship every Sunday. They 
certainly are as well brought up as average people are. 
When the name of God is pronounced what thoughts and 
feelings are stirred? Is it a name that makes their souls 
quiver with delight? Is there something in it both ex- 
hilarating and restful to you? When you are tired and 
worn is there something in the mention of God’s name 
that brings down the dews of heaven to cool your 
parched brow? Is there in it everything that is gentle 
and tender and sweet and loving and lovable? Does it 
mean all that you ought to be and ten million times 
more of goodness and lovableness than you feel you ever 
can attain? There never was any one who felt a deeper 
delight in God than Frederick W. Faber did. If you 
read Faber’s poems you will find that he always rises 
into raptures when he speaks of God. In his hymn called 
‘The Heavenly Father,’’ he says: 


** Only to sit and think of God, 
Oh what a joy it is! 
To think the thought, to breathe the name, 
Earth has no higher bliss.’’ 


He is literally enamoured of God as David was at times. 
And when he brings earthly joys into comparison with 


36 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


the joy he has in God they fade into nothingness. You 
remember that rapturous poem in which he says: 
**Oh utter but the name of God 
Down in your heart of hearts, 


And see how from the world at once 
All tempting light departs.’’ 


Sometimes I think that our notions about God com- 
pare with the reality about Him pretty much as some 
bit of a cramped, ill-cared for garden plot compares with 
the miles and miles of meadows that God sows in the 
spring-time with buttercups and daisies. Not far from 
where I spend the summers there is a cottage where a 
little girl was living. She had made a little garden patch 
by the front door of her house. Instead of putting into 
it some sort of cultivated flowers, she simply transferred 
to it a little bunch of flowers from the field. She dug 
up a clump of daisies and put them in. Most of them 
faded at once and all her care induced only one stalk 
to bloom feebly. It was the most pitiful thing imagi- 
nable compared with the great stretch of daisies that we 
could see from the hilltop going as far as the eye could 
reach. One day late in the summer I saw she had put 
into her little plot a bunch of goldenrod. There stood 
the faded stalks of the plants she had put there the day 
before, and the goldenrod, too, was withering from be- 
ing transplanted. After looking at that child’s poor 
garden I rode a hundred miles and more, and I saw the 
goldenrod on every side so plenteous that it seemed as 
though the sun itself had fallen and stained the earth 
with its colour, and I thought that that little patch of a 
child’s garden is to the boundless stretch of the flower- 
ing fields just about what our notion of the glories of 
God’s character is compared with what He really is. You 
cannot possibly exaggerate God’s goodness and beauty. 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN GOD? ot 


He is better than poets’ songs have represented Him to 
be. He is better than dying saints have imagined Him to 
be. He is better than anything the thoughts of men can 
conceive Him to be. When this world’s scenes have 
passed away and we see Him as He is in the world to 
come, we shall find that the reality is infinitely above 
anything our hearts have dreamed. 

To be certain that God exists and that we are in right 
relations with Him is the only source of enduring peace 
of mind. Archdeacon Farrar once asked Robert Brown- 
ing whether there were any lines in all the poetry he 
had written which expressed in a few words all that was 
fundamental to his thought and life. Mr. Browning said 
‘Yes’? and then he quoted these lines: 


‘‘He at least believed in soul, 
Was very sure of God.” 


Ah, it is a great thing to be able to say that one is very 
sure of God. If you say that and mean it, you can walk 
through a much disturbed world and yet have a serene 
mind. If you are sure of God, nothing else need give 
you the slightest concern. If you have no sense of a 
ruling and overruling God, the thoughtful man sees 
enough to distress him even when life moves on in its 
usual fashion without special shock or horror. William 
Rathbone Greg, the English philosopher, saw so many 
malignant diseases and cancers eating the life out of 
civilized communities that he quite lost heart and said 
that the best thing that could happen to our planet 
would be for it to fall into the sun or be shattered by 
collision with some other planet. If you lose sight of 
the power and purpose of God that is as good an end 
as one could hope for. But God has better things in 
mind for our planet. It is better to redeem and recon- 


38 CAN WE BELIEVE? ) 


struct the world than to destroy the world. And the 
greatness and power of God are pledged to that end. 
Things are not to go on from bad to worse until the 
corruption of the world is complete. The fact that 
God’s Son taught us to pray for His kingdom to come is 
proof that He intends to answer that prayer, and that 
He will redeem the world and establish His people in it. 

Let me quote Sojourner Truth again. In the dark 
days before the Civil War when everything seemed lost 
for the slave, Frederick Douglass was speaking very 
pessimistically to a great audience in Rochester, N. Y., 
when Sojourner Truth got up and stretching out her 
bony arm toward the platform, she pointed at him and 
said, ‘‘Frederick, is God dead? ’’? There is the crux of 
the whole matter. Do you believe in a living God or 
not? If God is not dead we may still expect that justice 
will be done ultimately. Wrong may triumph for a 
while; the innocent may suffer; the good cause may have 
many a setback; it may seem as though all that is right 
has gone to the dogs, but if you still believe that God 
lives and reigns, you cannot despair. No matter how 
awry things may be; no matter how mighty wrong may 
become; no matter how many of our ideals may be 
shattered; no matter how large the majority against 
righteousness is; if we can but believe that God is still 
on the throne we can go about our work undisturbed. 
If the Lord reigns we can sing as Browning’s Pippa did 
in the streets of Asolo, ‘‘God’s in His heaven, all’s right 
with the world.’’ 

Many things that have gone on in the world for the 
last twenty-five years have saddened right-thinking 
people. Society has suffered a great relapse into bar- 
barism. Many have seemed to believe more in force than 
in righteousness. The mailed fist has seemed likely to be 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN GOD? 39 


deified. Napoleon’s creed that God was on the side of the 
strongest battalions has once more come to the front, and 
hardly a nation has remanded it to the rear. But God 
has not abdicated despite appearances. He is still in 
control of things, be sure of that. It may be that the 
world will have to suffer yet more before men feel as 
they should their utter dependence on God. It may be 
that the burdens we are carrying will yet more over- 
strain us, and the tasks that confront us will become 
more bewildering, yet if we look to God and depend on 
Him we can face the future with confidence. 

But the idea of God that is needed in this period of 
the world’s reconstruction is not one that we have been 
accustomed to preach. We have so misconceived the 
meaning of John’s statement that God is love, that we 
have spoken as though God were a piece of infinite 
mushiness, looking on all men alike. Dr. Dale of Bir- 
mingham, for many years before he died, lamented that 
‘‘nobody is afraid of God now.’’ It is a very significant 
statement, and it ought to arouse serious misgivings in 
the mind of every Christian preacher. It is undeniably 
true that ‘“‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of 
wisdom,’’ and yet there is reason to believe that all fear 
of the Lord has so utterly faded out of the thought of 
men that not even the veriest rascal that walks the earth 
is afraid of God now. But in these recent years human 
nature has disclosed itself anew to us, and these times 
have reinterpreted God to us. We have come to feel 
that all that is best in life is lost to us unless the God 
who is on the throne of the universe is one who will deal 
out justice to men. Sickened by brutal atrocities and 
by impudent dishonesties which are not done yet, we 
have come to feel that God could not be God unless He 
is angry with the wicked every day. 


40 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


The real prophet of God is one who can stand up in 
the midst of prevailing wickedness, and say to those who 
sit in misery and desolation, ‘‘Do not lose heart, hope in 
God despite your anguish. <A day of recompense is com- 
ing. God will right things by and by, if you are 
patient.’’ It is a great thing in times of wide-spread 
distress, when things seem as wrong as they well could 
be, to be commissioned by God to proclaim to the world 
the truth as Lowell did when he said: 


“Right forever on the scaffold, 
Wrong forever on the throne; 
Yet that scaffold sways the future 
And behind the dim unknown 
Standeth God within the shadow, 
Keeping watch above His own.’ 

I do not know how it seems to you, but to me it is a 
veritable gospel, a piece of good news, that God hates 
sin and means to punish it. To be sure, if we have the 
spirit of Christ we would that all men should turn to 
Him and live. It is our business in life to persuade men 
that God will welcome and pardon all who turn to Him. 
But it would be a terrible thing if those who turn and 
those who refuse to turn should come out at the same 
place in the end. It would be a dreadful thing if a man 
could go on misbehaving himself and then get all the 
bliss that belongs to good behaviour. What an unjust 
thing it would be if a man should give himself to Jesus 
Christ, and should live a good, kind, pure life, refusing 
to turn aside to evil when it seems pleasant, and in all 
ways denying himself for the sake of the right, and then 
at the end should find himself banished to the wretched- 
ness that belongs to the bad man. And it would be an 
equally unjust thing if the man of careless, selfish, 
wicked life should at the end be welcomed to the bliss 
that belongs to the good man. 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN GOD? 41 


Any man who has eyes and is willing to use them 
must see that things are not dealt out evenly in this 
world. Men do not have an equal chance. Society is 
not a system of perfect justice. Something surely is 
wrong when Dives rides in a chariot, and Lazarus begs 
at his gate; when the righteous go to the wall and the 
wicked are put into office; when Nero luxuriates in a 
palace and Paul languishes in a dungeon. And God is 
going to set such things right some day. He is a God 
of justice. That certainly is part of the message that 
any man who speaks of God must give. 

These are the things that ought to be fundamental to 
all our thinking in these days; that the God who as- 
suredly rules in the universe is an absolutely righteous 
God; that He cannot look on iniquity with the least de- 
gree of allowance; that He has compassion on the weak 
and the downtrodden, but He is relentless toward the 
oppressor; that while He is full of mercy toward the 
most inexcusable sinner who repents and turns to Him, 
yet with exact justice He will cast from Him forever all 
who persist in their sin; and that He is almighty to 
earry out His righteous plans. God is for the good man 
and the good cause and He intends to lift them up. 
God is not only against the bad man and the bad eause, 
but He is able to throw them down and He intends to 
throw them down. There is no need to worry about the 
future. We need not tremble for God’s cause in the 
world. An almighty and a just God is at the head of 
things, He watches all the affairs of the world, He is 
in control of them, He faints not neither is weary, He 
is full of compassion and tender mercy, and He is exactly 
just as well, and will make His awards in righteousness 
to every man. 


Til 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE? 


“Thy word is truth.’—JoHN 17:17. 


HE Parliament which made Oliver Cromwell 
Protector of the Commonwealth of England, 
Seotland and Ireland, appointed a Committee 
to draw up a list of the Fundamentals of Faith. It 
seems that the instrument of government which gave 
Cromwell his authority said that all who professed ‘‘ faith 
in God by Jesus Christ’’ should have free exercise of 
their religion throughout the realm. And this eommit- 
tee was appointed to define what that phrase ‘‘faith in 
God by Jesus Christ’? meant. Dr. John Owen, the 
greatest theologian of his time, and Richard Baxter, the 
author of The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, were mem- 
bers of that Committee. When they got at their task 
of defining what the limits of religious toleration were, 
it did not take them long to discover as Baxter quaintly 
said ‘‘how ticklish a business the enumeration of funda- 
mentals is.’’ 

But we cannot go astray in declaring that it is funda- 
mental with Protestant Christians to acknowledge the 
authority of the Scriptures. The oft-quoted words of 
William Chillingworth are a true statement of our posi- 
tion, ‘‘The Bible, I say, the Bible only is the religion of 
Protestants.’’ The Bible is not looked upon by us as 
other books are. It has always been regarded as our 
supreme rule of faith and practice. It is not regarded 


simply as a piece of literature. Literature is addressed 
49 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE? 43 


by man to man. The Bible is revelation. Revelation is 
addressed by God to man. 

Just here is the heart of the present controversy in the 
Protestant world. It is a conflict between those who 
accept the authority of the Bible because it is divinely 
inspired, and those who acknowledge no authority out- 
side the human mind and recognize no communication. 
of truth as superior to the utterances of reason or 
science. It is the old battle that has been fought many 
times in the past in which rationalism is arrayed against 
revelation. 

Many years ago I said to the Council that examined 
me for ordination: ‘‘I accept the Bible unmutilated.’’ 
Those were the days of the famous Andover controversy. 
Some who were present that afternoon in the little white 
country church where I began my ministry, did not like 
the statement. Many would not like it to-day. And 
yet I did not then and I do not now mean to make any 
insinuating suggestion. I simply meant to declare my 
absolute confidence in the oneness of the Holy Scrip- 
tures, and to intimate that any subtraction from them 
would be a mutilation of them. It was not an ill-con- 
sidered statement when I made it at the first, though I 
was then but a youth fresh from college and the theolog- 
ical seminary. And I am willing to make the statement 
again to-day, after many years have furnished me with 
ample opportunities for careful and profound considera- 
tion, opportunities which have not passed unused. 

During all these years I have felt no fear about the 
Book. I have enjoyed an unshakable conviction that it 
is God’s book; that He is able to take care of it; and 
that He will take care of it. The people who have sat 
under my ministry have known that I never was afraid 
of criticism of the Bible. The spirit of some critics I 


At CAN WE BELIEVE? 


have condemned and their dicta I have unhesitatingly 
repudiated. But criticism so far as it meant careful, 
intelligent, honest and scholarly study of the Scriptures, 
1 have always welcomed. The Bible itself invites and 
common sense approves it. The higher the claims any 
book makes for itself, and the more positive its demands 
for our obedience to it, the more searching our scrutiny 
of it should be. I have no use for the superstitious 
eredulity that is determined to believe the Book no mat- 
ter what its contents. And I have no use on the other 
hand for the critic who is determined not to believe no 
matter what its contents. The blind believer and the 
blind disbeliever are equally fools, both of them having 
cast reason to the winds. And I do not know but the 
man who professes to believe in the Bible but denounces 
those who undertake to examine its claims, and mani- 
fests fear about the results of the examination, does the 
Book more harm than the worst critic of the Word could 
do. It is another case of needing the Lord to take care 
of our friends, while we ourselves are quite able to take 
care of our enemies. He does not believe in the Bible 
who hugs it to his bosom and runs off with it into dark- 
ness fearing to bring it to the light lest its statements 
be disproved. But he believes in the Bible who con- 
fidently seeks to have all possible light shed upon it, and 
who feels that the more we study the Bible, the more 
we shall see what an infinite treasure we have in this 
book of God. 

Now while I have not shut my ears against anything 
that scholarship has to say about the Bible; and while I 
have done all that a busy pastor could do to keep up 
with the work of Biblical students at home and abroad, 
yet I am obliged to say, and I say it without any hesita- 
tion or sense of shame, that I have to-day pretty much 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE? 45 


the same Bible that my godly father gave me many 
years ago. There are just as many books in my Bible 
as there were in his. The parables are all there. The 
miracles are unshattered. The history remains trust- 
worthy. The requirements are just as high. The assur- 
ances are just as comforting. The promises are just as. 
reliable. I find myself preaching from the Book pretty 
much as he did. And I make the bold claim that in 
spite of the supposedly superior light of the present he 
was as expert a student of the Word as we. Not with 
grammar and lexicon. He did not know much about 
varied readings, or interpolations, or clay tablets, or the 
results of excavations. But he knew God as the men 
who walk the halls of Seripture knew Him, and he 
knew how to make others acquainted with Him. 

It was the boast of Tertullian, the author of that fine 
saying, ‘‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the 
Church,’’ that every mechanic among the Christians of 
his day knew God and could make Him known to others, 
and it delighted Tertullian to set that fact in contrast 
with the ignorance about God of Thales, the Greek 
philosopher, just as Tertullian’s Master once said, ‘‘I 
thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, be- 
cause thou hast hid these things from the wise and 
prudent and revealed them unto babes.’’ Well, then, 
like those Christians of old, my father knew God and 
he believed His Word implicitly. He did not know 
anything about the ‘‘Joseph traditions’? concerning 
which modern scholars have done so much guessing, and 
when he told me the story of Joseph as I stood by his 
armchair one Sunday afternoon he spoke as though it 
was all true. He never had heard that Dr. Cheyne said 
that: ‘‘ Abraham was simply a typical example of un- | 
worldly goodness elaborated by several schools of .“ 


46 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


writers.’? He thought that Abraham was a real man, 
faithful enough to be called the ‘‘friend of God’’ and 
when he told me the story of Abraham offering his son 
Isaac as a sacrifice, I could fairly see the angel swoop 
down and arrest the hand that was uplifted for the 
slaughter. Of course, he did not know anything about 
‘the story of the deluge being a myth which the Hebrews 
had borrowed from the Babylonians, and that it was 
fundamentally a myth of winter and the sun god. He 
thought it was a true record of God’s wrath against a 
world that had given itself up to sin. And so one Sun- 
day afternoon after a shower when we took a walk to- 
gether he told me that there was once a terrific and pro- 
longed downpour of rain, and that the waters prevailed 
over the earth, and God’s enemies were destroyed and 
only a handful of people were saved in an ark, and 
through them humanity had another chance. And I 
remember walking by his side that afternoon full of 
awe as one who had seen the judgments of the Lord. 
And when every day that dear father of mine used to 
read from that book and then fall on his knees and talk 
with God every one of his children felt that God was 
a reality and that He was there in that room with us. 
No wonder, then, that having spent my childhood under 
the tuition of a man who knew God face to face, I feel 
much more obligation to him for showing me the Bible 
as a living Book than I feel to these so-called scholars 
who have taken what Jean Astrue ealled ‘‘conjectures’’ 
and extended them and acted as though they were ‘‘cer- 
tainties,’? and have merely shown how skilfully what 
seems to them a dead book ean be dissected. 

There is another way of knowing the Bible than by a 
eritical study of the text or a scrutiny of its origins, 
and that is by the illumination of the Holy Spirit. The 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE? 47 


Bible knows how to bear witness to itself. The divine 
qualities are intrinsic and they are self-authenticated. 
They are not dependent on anybody or anything out- 
side for certification. We do not believe the Bible be- 
cause of anybody’s attestation of it but because of what 
it is in itself. It is not necessary for us to have the 
countersignature of Tiibingen, or Leipsic, or Berlin, or 
Oxford, before we read the divine Word. The Psalmist 
prayed, ‘“‘Open THOU mine eyes and I shall behold 
wondrous things out of thy law’’ and to all appearances 
his prayer was answered. The discouraged disciples 
after the great tragedy found in Him who was dead but 
was now alive forevermore, the teacher they needed and 
it is written, ‘Then opened HE their understandings that 
they might understand the Scriptures.’? Grammar and 
lexicon and historical acumen are no doubt valuable in 
their places, but men may know the Bible well without 
them. And on the other hand men may feel that they 
know the source of every paragraph in the Book and 
the historical setting of every incident recorded, and the 
biography of every word that is used, and yet altogether 
miss the inner meaning of the Book. It is as true to- 
day as ever it was that some things are revealed to us 
through the Spirit. And I cannot escape the conviction 
that if we approach the Bible in sympathy and gratitude 
we get more from the Bible than if we come with chal- 
lenge and criticism. Scholars who are disposed to sneer 
at the average man’s attitude toward the Bible should 
remember that it was to very plain men that Jesus Christ 
said, ‘‘To you it is given to know the mysteries of the 
kingdom but to them it was not given.’’ 

There are a score of lines of argument we might fol- 
low to prove the divine origin of the Bible. Let me take 
but one, and find in the marvellous unity of the Book 


48 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


evidence that the hand that made it was divine. I will 
speak of the oneness of the Bible in its effects, in its 
structure, and in the personality it presents. 

A man who never had seen a Bible who should pick 
it up and look into it would perceive at once that it is 
not like other books. It deals with wonderful things. 
It speaks in a wonderful way. The majesty of its words 
makes them sound different from men’s words. There 
is an impressive positiveness in the statements it makes. 
There is an air of authority in the way it commands you. 
There is an insight into our nature that makes us trem- 
ble; a perception of our needs that fills us with hope; 
and a power to satisfy those needs that goes beyond what 
we dared to hope. And these qualities so pervade the 
entire book that there are many people who declare that 
they can open the Bible at random and find the inspira- 
tion and comfort they need, and I am not disposed to 
dispute what they say. For it is undeniable that every 
part of the Bible has been instrumental in awakening 
men to their sense of need, in relieving their consciences 
of their burden of guilt, in enlightening their minds as 
to what they ought to do, and in making their lives 
beautiful with gladness. 

Archbishop Leighton has told us of a man who entered 
a church in Glasgow in his day and heard the fifth 
chapter of Genesis read. That chapter, as you know, 
is nothing but a list of the names of the patriarchs from 
Adam to Noah, and the number of years they lived. 
Did I say nothing but a list of names? No, for we have 
in that chapter the most marvellous description of a 
good man’s life, and the aptest account of his departure 
from this world, that ever were written, ‘‘ Enoch walked 
with God, and he was not for God took him.’’ But i% 
was not that verse that impressed the listener that day. 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE? 49 


Archbishop Leighton tells us that the man left the 
church that day a converted man and the thing that 
converted him was the constant repetition of that phrase, 
‘*And he died.’’ Dr. Robert F. Horton in alluding to 
this incident says, ‘‘I believe you can show concerning 
every book beginning at Genesis and going on to the 
very end, that every page has its trophies.’? And then 
he tells of a French skeptic who was converted by study- 
ing for philological purposes that same fifth chapter of 
Genesis. 

No one has a better chance to learn of how the Book 
finds men out than the missionaries. And what testi- 
mony do the missionaries give us? Listen. Robert 
McAll says that one evening after giving an exposition 
of Scripture in the city of Lyons a man came to him 
with tears running down his cheeks and said, ‘‘Never 
have I heard the truth so proclaimed. My conscience 
answers to it.’? How wonderfully significant those 
words are, ‘‘My conscience answers to it.’”’ 

Once when Dr. John Chamberlain had read to the 
natives of an East Indian city the first chapter of the 
epistle to the Romans, an intelligent Brahmin said to 
him, ‘‘Sir, that chapter was written by one of you mis- 
sionaries about us Hindus; it describes us so exactly.’’ 
But nobody disputes that that chapter was written by 
the apostle Paul eighteen hundred years before our mis- 
slonaries went to India. 

At another time a learned Chinese man was employed 
by some missionaries to translate the New Testament 
into Chinese. At first the work of translating had no 
effect upon the scholarly Chinese man. But after some 
time he became quite agitated and said, ‘‘ What a won- 
derful book this is!’’ ‘‘Why so?’’ said the missionary. 
‘‘Because,’’ said the Chinese man, ‘‘it tells me so exactly 


50 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


about myself. It knows all that is in me. The One who 
made this book must have made me.’’ 

Dr. Robert F. Horton, from whom I have already 
quoted, seems to have made a specialty of preaching 
about the Bible, and he has made the startling announce- 
ment that if any man will with unprejudiced mind read 
the Bible it will surely bring him to God. He mentions 
the Moslems. They are particularly difficult to move 
from their religious faith. He says that the only way 
a Moslem is ever brought to faith in Christ is when he 
is induced to read the Bible. If once you can get a 
Mohammedan to read the Bible his conversion is cer- 
tain. He ean resist preaching. He can resist denuncia- 
tion, of course. All of us can do that. But he cannot 
resist the Bible. Dr. Horton gives us an incident of an 
English officer in Kashmir who was a devout Christian 
man. He was shooting in the mountains of Kashmir ac- 
companied by his native servant who was a Moham- 
medan. This Englishman was no more ashamed to be 
seen praying than his Mohammedan servant was. Every 
day he read his Bible and prayed in his tent. The ser- 
vant observed it. He was not surprised at the praying 
but he was curious about the reading. He asked his 
master what it was he read. His master explained to 
him that it was the New Testament, and then he said, 
**Tf you would read it, I will get you a copy. But you 
must promise to read it.’? The Mohammedan said he 
would. The English officer procured him a New Testa- 
ment in his own language. The native read it, and be- 
fore long he came asking to be baptized, and he became 
himself a herald of the cross and was no longer a follower 
of the crescent. And then Dr. Horton says, ‘‘This Book 
left to itself, without note or comment, without explana- 
tion or criticism, left in the hands of any reader who is 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE? D1 


not hardened or prejudiced and determined to resist it, 
brings a man to God. You want no better proof of what 
a book is than that.’’ 

Dr. Dale, of Birmingham, has told us in one of his 
bocks of a conversation he had with a Japanese gentle- 
man of high intelligence and culture who had accepted 
Christianity. The good Doctor asked him by what argu- 
ments he had been convinced that Christianity was the 
true religion. He did not get the answer he expected. 
The thoughtful and learned man said that he had read 
no books of evidences, but he told how in his heathen 
days he had been a seeker after truth, and as he studied 
the cold system of Confucius he longed for a revelation 
of a personal God. At length a New Testament came 
into his hands, and as he read it he seemed to be find- 
ing at every step just what he had been seeking. When 
he came to the thirteenth chapter of Ist Corinthians he 
was fairly dazzled with the glory and truth and felt 
that it must be divine. And when he read the gospel 
of John he became sure that Jesus was the Son of God. 
This seems always to be the result of an unprejudiced, 
open-minded reading of the Bible. It carries conviction 
to all who so read it that it comes from God, just as we 
know that the light about us comes from the sun. 

Now when we find this Book so exactly adapted to all 
races of mankind,—to the passionate Arabian, the slug- 
gish Greenlander, the low born Hottentot, and the high 
bred Chinese, the philosophic Greek and the practical 
mind of the Roman, the studious German and the polite 
Frenchman, the thoughtful Englishman, the enterpris- 
ing American and the quick-witted Japanese,—when we 
find it so well meeting the needs of all sorts and condi- 
tions of men, we must agree with the learned Chinese 
man that only the Creator of man could be the Creator 


D2 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


of the Book. It is the one book that appeals to all ages 
alike. It is the one book that appeals to all classes alike. 
‘A Canadian preacher has told us that in his own home 
one day he went into a room and found his little daugh- 
ter who at once cried out, ‘‘Oh, papa, nurse has been 
reading me such a beautiful story. Don’t stop us 
please.’’ He found that the nurse had been reading the 
story of Joseph from the Bible. Soon after he went over 
to the home of Sir William Dawson, geologist and nat- 
uralist, and he found him poring with equal interest 
over the same story. The same Book for the old and 
the young, the rich and the poor, the learned and the 
ignorant, the sorrowing and the rejoicing! This is no 
merely human book. It brings tears to eyes that have 
been dry because pitiless, and it wipes away tears from 
eyes that are overflowing. It arouses the careless and 
it brings peace to the penitent. There is not an experi- 
ence into which the human soul can come for which this 
Book has not an appropriate message. Surely we are 
right when we say that only He who knows man alto- 
gether could have made a Book that so exactly helps 
every man. 

From the singularly uniform results that come from 
reading the pages of this Book we can easily infer that 
in all its parts it must have a singularly uniform char- 
acter. And it has. It is a book marked by great di- 
versity, to be sure. If some one who had never seen 
it before should pick it up and examine it he would find 
that it is not a single book, but a whole library. Here 
are sixty-six books bound together. Some of them cover 
only a page or two and you could read them through 
in a few minutes. Others are fair size volumes and 
would take many hours to read aright. These books were 
written by as many as forty different authors. These 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE? Do 


authors lived in differcnt lands. They wrote in several 
different languages. They represent every social condi- 
tion; they were kings, courtiers, shepherds, farmers, 
fishermen, a physician, and a publican; men of every 
degree of culture. Hach author was evidently conscious 
of being free in the work that he did; he developed his 
own theme and used his own peculiar style of expres- 
sion. These men wrote, some of them, as much as fifteen 
hundred years apart. There was no possibility of col- 
lusion. Indeed they did not know that what they wrote 
was to be a part of a book, so thoroughly independent 
were they in their writing. And yet the result of their 
writing is not many books, but one book; a book so in- 
tensely one that we bind all its parts together and fol- 
lowing the example of John Chrysostom, we eall it ‘‘The 
Book,’’ the Bible. And really that is one of the most 
marvellous things in the world. It is scareely possible 
for any two men to report alike about anything they 
observe. It is as impossible to get two men to think 
alike as it was for Charles V to get two clocks to tick 
alike in the famous experiment he made. Men differ 
about the simplest and most commonplace things. And 
yet we are confronted with this remarkable harmony of 
the Bible. Its authors, as we have seen, were men of 
the most diverse tyne. The literary forms in which they 
expressed themselves were very different,—poetry and 
prose, the poetry lyric and dramatic; the prose, history, 
philosophy, and prophecy. And the subjects on which 
they wrote were also those on which nature and their 
own thinking would give them the least light. And yet 
in the whole fifteen hundred years of its composition, 
the aim of the Book was one, its principles were un- 
changed, its view of God and man remained the same, 
and all over the world among the most varied peoples 


54 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


the effect of reading any part of the Book is always the 
same. There is nothing like such unity anywhere else. 
It is not natural. Men could not produce such unity if 
they set out to do it. They could only approach it. 
What explanation shall we give? We can best get at it 
by an illustration. 

You go some evening to a musicale. A symphony 
orchestra is before you. There are forty players, let us 
say. They are a very varied lot of men, of very diverse 
temperaments, they come from different homes, and they 
approach their work in very different moods. The in- 
struments they play are very different; some are of 
strings, some are reed instruments made of wood, some 
are of brass, some are of skins stretched tight. Each 
man has his own strain to play and these strains sound 
very different when heard separately. But when they 
are played together the harmony is ravishing. How do 
you account for the unity of effect? You are in no 
dilemma about that. You say one mind governed them 
all. One man wrote the symphony and each of the 
players gets his directions from the one composer. We 
cannot think of such unity in result, such harmonious 
volume of sound without thinking of one master mind 
as its cause. 

My church built a new house of worship not long 
since. I often went to look at the men in their work 
of building. There was a small army of them. They 
were working on every part of the structure. They were 
very different men. The materials they worked with were 
very different. There was steel from Pennsylvania mills. 
There was limestone from Indiana. There was other 
stone from quarries at Germantown. There was wood 
from the forests of the northwest. There was such a 
diversity of materials as forbids mention of the many 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE? 5D 


kinds. Hach man went about his work without paying 
much heed to most of the other men. And yet out of 
all that confusion of movement the structure daily grew 
into finer perfection of beauty and usefulness. And if, 
as I stood there, you had asked me for an explanation 
of such harmony of result, I should have pointed you 
to a man who now and then moved about among the 
workmen, stopping here and there to look, and now and 
then calling the attention of some of the men to a sheet 
he had in his hands. That man was the superintending 
architect and the sheet to which he referred was the de- 
tailed plan of the building, and that plan was the work 
of the one master mind that controlled everybody who 
did a stroke of work on that building. 

So of the marvellous harmony of the Bible. There is 
‘no reasonable explanation of the impressively harmonious 
work done by these forty or more men, unless we accept 
the statement that many of them made plainly and re- 
peatedly, that they were inspired and controlled by one 
master mind, the mind of God Himself. That is a sen- 
sible and a satisfying explanation. 

The unity of the Bible is all the more remarkable 
when you remember that its teachings were often at 
variance with the notions that prevailed among the 
people with whom some of the authors lived. Men are 
usually profoundly affected by the ideas of their time. 
Environment is counted mightier than heredity to-day. 
Tennyson said, ‘‘I am part of all I have met.’’ Ordi- 
narily that is true of men. When Dr. Barnard C. Tay- 
lor retired from his place as Professor in Crozer Theo- 
lozieal Seminary which he honorably filled for more than 
forty years he said that he wished he could analyze him- 
self and see just where each part came from. Often 
we can do something of that sort. We say of one trait 


56 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


as Spurgeon used to say of his gout, ‘‘That came from 
my grandfather.’’ Of another trait we say, ‘‘My father 
is responsible for that.’? And we explain another by 
saying, ‘‘I had a friend and I learned that of him.”’ 
And no doubt the Biblical writers betray many of their 
life relations by the ideas they express and the way they 
express them. Yet in the great thing for which God was 
using them,—to reveal to men His own character, His 
abhorrence of sin, His grief over their fall, and the 
method by which they must be redeemed,—the Bible 
writers were held absolutely true, and they always found 
themselves in instant revolt against the things which 
would in any way corrupt their thought. 

Some have impressed it upon us that Moses learned 
much from the Egyptians and that what the Jews have 
given us they got from Babylonia, and Egypt, and 
Assyria. Stephen does indeed tell us that Moses was 
learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. But one of 
the main things Moses learned in Egypt was not to do 
as the Egyptians did. No doubt in Egypt he was in the 
‘midst of the greatest civilization of his time, but through 
‘what God had taught him he found himself in revolt 
against it. Turn to the book of Genesis that carries the 
story of our race back to its beginning and you will find 
there a view of things that is a flat contradiction of the 
notions that prevailed among the Egyptians and among 
the other nations that were neighbours to the Hebrews. 
Moses shows God creating the sun and moon and stars. 
Now, you know that the sun and moon and stars were 
the gods of the nations round about the Jews. But in 
Moses’ view they were simply the creatures of God’s 
hand. The more you read that story and reflect upon 
it, the more marvellou§ it will seem to you. All through 
that first chapter of Genesis Moses is demolishing the 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE? 57 


gods of the heathen. With almost every stroke of his 
pen a god goes down. And if you are familiar with the 
isms of to-day, and the prevailing false philosophies, you 
will find that that chapter demolishes them with equal 
effectiveness. And before the discerning reader gets to 
the end of that chapter, instead of worshipping any crea- 
ture he finds himself bowing before the Creator of 
heaven and earth and all that in them is. 

Turn to Leviticus. Many do not like the atmosphere 
of the book. It is full of blood. There are several 
good reasons for that, which it would be aside from my 
purpose here even to allude to. The book is so distaste- 
ful to some men who have no insight that they have 
called the priest of God in it a butcher, and the Lord’s 
altars have been sneered at as shambles. But think of 
what Moses is doing in that book. When he got his 
unorganized mass of people out into the wilderness he 
had to teach them. How should he do it? Remember 
that they had come from a land where the bull was a 
god. The Egyptians worshipped cattle. The one time 
when the Israelites broke away from Moses they set up 
a calf as their god showing that they had been pro- 
foundly influenced by their Egyptian life. But when 
Moses, the servant of the Lord, arranged his sacrifices, 
in what did they consist? They were cattle—the gods 
of paganism. Every morning and evening in the wor- 
ship of Jehovah the blood of an Egyptian god was 
poured out, and the flesh of an Egyptian god burned 
upon the altar. You see the point of it surely. All the 
gods of the heathen are offered in sacrifice to Him who 
alone is God. And so in books that have been spoken of 
slightingly we find exalted testimony borne to the same 
great truths that are set forth in the other books of the 
Bible. And what I want to know is, where Moses got 


58 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


those ideas that are so different from the prevailing 
notions of his day, and so in harmony with those of the 
other writers of the sacred book. 


And we have testimony from the Lord Jesus Himself 
as to the unity of the Bible. He says that the books in 
it are one in pointing to Him. One great personality 
dominates the Bible. Does it sound a bit old-fashioned 
to say that each Book of the Old Testament has Christ 
as its object and centre? And yet I say just that. Our 
Lord Himself said that. I know that there are many 
who do not believe it, and they are men who think they 
understand the Scriptures, too. But do not be troubled. 
They are no new species. In the Saviour’s time there 
were two men who thought they knew the Scriptures, but 
they could not see Christ in them, and the Lord rebuked 
them for their blindness and said, ‘‘O fools and slow of 
heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.’’ 
‘And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he ex- 
pounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things con- 
cerning himself.’’ They had a Bible-reading that after- 
noon conducted by the Lord Himself, and His subject 
was ‘‘Christ in the Old Testament.’’ I should like to 
have been with them then. On another occasion He said 
of the Scriptures, ‘‘They are they which testify of me.’’ 
And on another occasion still He said, ‘‘ All things must 
be fulfilled which are written in the law, and in the 
prophets and in the Psalms concerning me.’’ That 
covers all the divisions of the Old Book. It is a unit in 
its message concerning Christ. We can hear His lips 
saying, ‘‘In the volume of the Book it is written of me.”’ 
It is. He Himself hath said it. If we are not able to 
see it we should mourn over our blindness and ask Him 
to open our understanding, and He will do it, and our 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE? 59 


hearts will burn within us while He talks with us by 
the way and opens unto us the Scriptures. 

That the purpose of the New Testament is to present 
Christ to us we do not need to have demonstrated to us. 
The purpose of the whole book John gives when he states 
the purpose of his Gospel as he concludes it, ‘* These 
things are written that ye might believe that Jesus is 
the Christ the Son of God, and that believing ye might 
have life through, his name.”’ 

All that has been said is only a beginning. There are 
scores of signs of the Book’s mysterious unity to which 
I may not even allude. No matter how these books came 
together, they are one book. Whatever the principle of 
selection was, the result is such a volume that you cannot 
add to it profitably, and you eannot subtract from it 
without hurt. Men have tried to cut out certain books. 
But those books are there yet in the Book. Sit down 
and read them and you will see that they deserve to be 
there. To take them away would be like severing a limb 
from the body or putting out an eye. It is a marvellous 
book, one in its purpose, one in its structure, one in its 
saving effect on those who read it. Back of its his- 
torians, back of its poets, back of its apostles, back of its 
seers who gave us their uplifting apocalyptic visions, 
there is one speaker, and that is the living God. The 
authors of the Book claimed to be the mouthpieces of 
the Almighty. Their work has proved itself to be God’s 
Word. 

There are some who would make a distinction between 
the words of Christ and the words of the prophets and 
the apostles. But the Lord Himself makes no such dis- 
tinction. He places Himself alongside the prophets who 
spoke before Him and the apostles who spoke after Him. 
You remember that He said, “‘The words that I speak 


60 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


unto you I speak not of myself, but my Father that 
dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.’’ And again, in 
His high priestly prayer He says, ‘‘I have given unto 
them the words which thou gavest me, and they have 
received them.’’ All of them spoke by the same au- 
thority. 

It is a wonderful Book! There is none like it. Men 
have studied it microsedpically. They have pulled it to 
pieces. They have tried to destroy it. But it has gone 
on ministering to the spiritual life of the centuries. It 
has shown a power to comfort and console, to strengthen 
and inspire men, to redeem men from sin and to develop 
in them Christlke qualities that set it quite apart 
from the books that men have written. Wonderful 
Book! Its author is God, its subjeet is Christ, its object 
is man’s salvation, its end is eternity, its name is the 
Bible. Wonderful Book! Do you read it? Will you 
read it as never before? It will make you wise above 
your fellows, wise unto salvation. Wonderful Book! 
No wonder men cling to it as worth more than life itself. 

“Let all the plans that men devise 
Assault that Book with treacherous art; 


T’ll call them vanity and lies, 
And bind the Bible to my heart.”’ 


IV 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE VIRGIN BIRTH? 


“And the virgin’s name was Mary.’—lLuxKs 1: 27. 


HEN the Son of God was born into the world 

\ \) He came amid demonstrations of joy such as 

the world never had witnessed before. The 
song of the angels in heaven was heard down on earth. 
God put a new star in the sky as a guide to those who 
had watched for His coming. The world at large was 
too dull to realize what was going on. But some per- 
ceived it; listened to the wonderful song; saw the shin- 
ing of that light that never was on land or sea; followed 
the mysterious star; and knelt at the feet of Him who 
was to be the world’s Saviour. What a wonderful story 
it is! How poor the world would be without it! And 
how natural it all seems and most appropriate, when you 
consider who it was that was born on that night so long 
ago! Only as you lower your conception of the nature 
and character of Jesus Christ, do you feel that the won- 
ders attending His birth should in any way be modified. 
Of course those who believe that Jesus Christ was only 
a man must have Him born as all the children of men 
have been born from the beginning of time. 

It need not surprise us that there have always been 
some who looked upon our Lord as only a man. Some 
who looked upon the miracles He did, and could not 
deny them yet refused to accept them as proof of His 
divine power, said that He did them by the power of 
the devil. There is nothing you can do that will win a 
favourable judgment from those who deliberately set 

61 


62 CAN eS BELIEVE? 


themselves against you. \ \ Prejudice rules more men than 
reason does. A man convinced against his will is of the 
same opinion still. Even when evidence is overwhelm- 
ing and cannot be answered, men will not admit it. 
Some men are so obstinate and sinful that in such a case 
they will simply plan to distort or destroy the evidence. 
Ernst Haeckel, who before his death mourned that he 
was the only follower of Darwin left, was so determined 
to demonstrate the theory of evolution that he delib- 
erately made false drawings, and illustrated his book 
with them to bolster up his theory, that never has been 
proved, and probably never can be. Men have been 
known to keep from the eyes of the people evidence 
which proved something they did not like, or they have 
even sought to destroy the evidence. We read that after 
the resurrection of Lazarus some of those who saw him 
sitting at a feast with the Lord who had raised him from 
the dead, were so determined that men should not be- 
lieve that Jesus had miraculous power that they plotted 
to destroy all evidence of it. John tells us that ‘‘the 
chief priests consulted together that they might put 
Lazarus also to death, because that by reason of him 
many of the Jews went away, and believed on Jesus.”’ 
“It is the most frightful use one can make of his mind, 
to use it to get rid of evidence of a truth that you do 
not wish to believe. The New Testament would seem to 
teach that that is the sin against the Holy Ghost,—to 
look on white and declare that it is black; to look on 
the works of Jesus Christ, and declare that they are 
done by the power of the devil; to listen to the wonder- 
ful story of the Saviour’s life and say that it is unbe- 
lievable; to have brought before us the evidence of His 
divine character and to say in the face of all the evi- 
dence, ‘‘It is nothing. He was only a man;’’ to look on 


THE VIRGIN BIRTH 63 


the wonders of His entrance into the world, and to 
pooh-pooh it and calumniate Him and reduce His birth 
to dreary commonplace. 

For hundreds of years the Christian Church has said 
reverently the words of the oldest of our creeds, ‘‘I be- 
lieve in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and 
earth; and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who 
was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin 
Mary.’’ But we are told by many to-day that we must 
omit this statement of the supernatural birth of our 
Lord. To be sure it is no new thing for this doctrine 
to be attacked. While it is true that, except for the 
Ebionites and some of the Gnosties, every body of Chris- 
tians that ever has existed has received the Virgin Birth 
as part of its faith, no doctrine has been more virulently 
and more persistently attacked than this. The authen- 
ticity and trustworthiness of Luke’s Gospel have been 
established as much as anything in this world ean be by 
the work of patient British scholars, and at least two 
distinguished scholars in Germany who have been far 
from orthodox in their faith, have attested the results, 
and have expressed astonishment that any one should 
doubt that Luke wrote both the Gospel and the Acts, 
the latter at the end of Paul’s imprisonment in Rome, 
and the Gospel at an earlier date. That means that 
Luke’s Gospel was written some years before A. D. 66, 
and yet it contains one of our clearest statements of the 
Virgin Birth. Even so radical a critic as Johannes Weiss 
admitted that the first and second chapters of Luke may 
have circulated in the Jewish Christian communities of 
Judea ‘‘in the sixties.’”? We can easily then accept the 
conclusion of Professor Theodor Zahn of Erlangen that 
the Virgin Birth ‘‘has been an element of the creed as 
far as we can trace it back, and if Ignatius can be taken 


64 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


as a witness of a baptismal creed springing from early in 
Apostolic times, certainly in that creed the name of the 
Virgin Mary already had its place. . . . The theory 
of an original Christianity without the belief in Jesus the 
Son of God, born of the virgin, is a fiction.’’ And yet 
for all its historic foundations would seem so secure, in 
every age there have been some who have hated the 
Christian religion andshave wished to annihilate it, have 
sneered at and tried to discredit this doctrine. But 
heretofore the attacks upon it have been made by the 
enemies of Christianity. ‘To-day we are astounded to 
find the same sort of attacks that were made by Cerin- 
thus, and Celsus, by Voltaire, and Tom Paine, made by 
men who stand in Christian pulpits and are seated in 
chairs in theological seminaries, who have formally given 
assent to Christian creeds which plainly include the doc- 
trine of the Virgin Birth, and who are supported by 
money provided by people who are loyal to Scriptural 
teaching and have wished to perpetuate it. This is the 
anomalous situation that confronts us to-day. 

Several times during the last quarter of the nineteenth 
century the controversy over the Virgin Birth prevailed 
among the scholars of Germany until Great Britain and 
America were involved in it. In 1892 Germany was 
greatly stirred by the refusal of a preacher and pastor 
named Schrempf to use the Apostles’ Creed in the church 
ritual because he disbelieved in the Virgin Birth and 
some other teachings of that creed. He was at least 
more honest than some are to-day who go on reciting 
the ereed in publie while privately disavowing their be- 
lief in it, and indeed now and then intimating in publie 
that the old faith is quite untenable. Schrempf was 
deposed from his office, but a great controversy arose and 
has continued to this day with increasing violence not 


THE VIRGIN BIRTH 65 


only over the Virgin Birth but about everything else in 
our Lord that sets Him apart from the rest of humanity. 
For you know you cannot separate the Virgin Birth from 
the other wonders of His life and death. They stand or 
fall together inevitably. The man who throws the super- 
natural birth overboard throws with it all the miracles 
Christ wrought, all thought of His sinlessness, all idea 
that there is any saving efficacy in His death, all faith 
in His resurrection, and of course regards as utter non- 
sense all teaching that He will come back again, Their 
antipathy to the Virgin Birth is simply a piece of their 
sworn enmity to everything supernatural. And so when 
they come to the study of documents that teach these 
things they come with their knives out. When they 
come upon anything that does not agree with their pre- 
conceived notion that there is nothing beyond what we 
see to be the ordinary course of nature, they simply 
throw it aside as unbelievable. Professor George Bur- 
man Foster, who was for so long a time professor of 
the philosophy of religion in the University of Chicago, 
said of the miracles of Jesus Christ, ‘‘ An intelligent 
man who now affirms his faith in such stories as actual 
facts can hardly know what intellectual honesty  §is.’’ 
The conceit of it! That is the mildest comment one can 
make on such a judgment as that. Professor Foster 
came to the conclusion that there is no manifestation of 
the supernatural in man’s life and therefore everything 
that did not agree with that notion of hig must be ruled 
out, and any man who does not accept his theory that 
limits the power of God in His own universe is not an 
honest man intellectually. The conceit of pronouncing 
such a judgment is colossal. 

Minot Savage says in his little book ‘‘Talks About 
Jesus,’’ ‘‘Let us look at the tales that the gospel nar- 


66 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


rators tell. We can dispose of John in a word. If you 
take the Gospel of John and read it through carefully 
with the one thought in mind you will find that through- 
out its pages Jesus is not treated as a man.’’ We are 
entirely ready to admit that. John did not look upon 
the Son of God merely as a man. He said distinctly 
ages before Dr. Savage was born that he wrote his Gospel 
that men might see that Jesus Christ was more than a 
man. The world did not have to wait for a person of 
Dr. Savage’s rare acumen to disclose it to them that 
John did not write of Jesus as though He was a man 
merely. John himself said in the Gospel, ‘‘ These things 
are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ 
the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life 
through his name.’’ It is singular that Dr. Savage did 
not remember that John said that, but it is gratifying 
that he elearly perceived that that was John’s purpose 
in writing his Gospel. But then Dr. Savage calmly says 
that because John believed that Jesus Christ was more 
than a man, we must throw his Gospel aside. The con- 
ceeit of it! To set up his own theory of the person of 
Christ, and that, a theory that robs Christ of all His 
glory and tramples under foot the claims He made for 
Himself and that sets at nought the judgment of the 
ages, and then insist that all shall accept his dicta! 
What amazing conceit this is to be sure! 

Two young men recently came out of a well-known 
theological seminary in New York City. They appar- 
ently were just coming from a classroom. They were 
earnestly talking together. It may fairly be assumed 
that they were thinking of the lesson of the hour and 
echoing the teaching of the classroom they just had 
left. I could not help overhearing them. One of them 
said to the other, ‘‘Yes, He was a great prophet, but a 


H 


THE VIRGIN BIRTH 67 


greater than He will arise some day.’’ They were talk- 
ing about Jesus Christ. And the conclusion they had 
been led to by the lesson of that hour was precisely what 
Theodore Parker said about Jesus Christ. But who gave 
them this rare power of estimating the past and proph- 
esying about the future? One who stood in a better 
place for knowing about Jesus Christ than they, said, 
‘“In him dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.’’ 
Could a greater one than that arise? Another who knew 
our Lord well said, ‘‘The Word was made flesh, and 
dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory of 
the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and 
truth.’’ Can any one in the future outdo that? And 
these men in addition to their better opportunities to 
know the character of Jesus Christ were, we believe, 
specially inspired of God to speak of Him. But their 
testimony is ruthlessly thrown aside as of no account 
because it does not agree with the prejudices of those 
men who by their deliberate choice are disbelievers in 
the supernatural. One is abundantly justified in speak- 
ing of the judgments of such men slightingly and of 
showing contempt for their scholarship. The true scholar 
has profound respect for facts. The true man of science 
has profound respect for facts. They ascertain their 
facts first, and form their theory afterwards. That is 
not scholarship that forms its theory first and then twists 
the facts into conformity with that theory, and if they 
are stubborn facts and will not be twisted throws them 
away declaring that they are not facts. 

Dr. Charles E. Jefferson in speaking of Jesus Christ 
and the mystery of His personality, says that we cannot 
help asking as they of old did ‘*‘ What manner of man is 
this?’’ And then he goes on to say, ‘‘The simplest of 
all solutions is to deny that Jesus was more than man. 


68 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


If He says He was, He is mistaken. If John says He was, 
John errs. Jf Paul says He was, Paul blunders. If the 
Church thinks He was, it thinks so because the Church is 
superstitious. That was the solution offered by the 
Ebionites in the first century, and that in substance is 
the solution offered by many to-day. ‘Do the Gospels 
say that Jesus was miraculously conceived,—cut that 
out, it is a myth. Do they say He arose from the dead, 
—ecut it out, it is a legend. Do they say He worked ~ 
miracles,—cut it out, it is an idle tale. Do they say He 
claimed to have existed before His birth,—cut it out, He 
probably never said it, and if He did He meant that 
He preéxisted only in the mind of God. Hallucinations 
in great men are common.’ That is one solution. It 
is the easiest of all.’? Those are sane words, well worth 
pondering. And then Dr. Jefferson goes on to say, 
‘It requires no extra brain power to use a pair of 
scissors, and to reach the conclusion that Jesus was only 
a man all one needs is a pair of scissors. The substitu- 
tion of a pair of shears for vigorous thought has often 
been made with great éclat, and with such consummate 
art as to blind ordinary mortals to the nature of the 
transaction. But the knack of using scissors ought not 
to be counted as conclusive evidence of an extraordinary 
endowment of brain power. We ought not to be hood- 
winked by the sleek insinuation that those who deny the 
divinity of Jesus are thinkers above all others, far in 
advance of this ignorant and superstitious age. The 
simple fact is that the humanitarian solution is no solu- 
tion at all. It is a sly evasion of the problem. When 
asked, ‘What manner of man is this?’ the humani- 
tarians blot out more than half of the New Testament, 
and build their answer on the flimsy fragment that re- 
mains.’’ 


THE VIRGIN BIRTH 69 


Contrary to my habit, I have made this long quota- 
tion, that you may see that one need not feel himself 
alone in looking with contempt on so-called scholarship 
that sneers at those who make room for God to manifest 
Himself to His creatures in the midst of His own world. 
And once admit that God can manifest Himself in 
human life, and all objections to the Virgin Birth, to the 
inspiration of the Seriptures, to the beneficent miracles 
that Jesus Christ wrought, and to the resurrection of 
the Saviour vanish at once. Professor Huxley was very 
far from being in agreement with orthodox Christianity 
but he was a true man of science and he said in his 
later years that it was unscientific to say that anything 
was impossible. His method was to ascertain the facts 
first and then to form your theory. 

Now what are the facts that support our belief in the 
miraculous birth of Jesus Christ? In the nature of the 
case direct evidence of it cannot be given by a multitude 
of witnesses as in the resurrection. Direct testimony 
could be given by only two witnesses, Joseph and Mary, 
and oddly enough it is their testimony that we have. 
The two men who tell us the story of the nativity are 
Matthew and Luke. Matthew was one of our Lord’s 
intimate followers. Luke is accounted one of the most 
trustworthy of ancient historians, very painstaking, and 
well acquainted with many of those who personally knew 
Christ. He was also the associate of the greatest apostle 
of Jesus Christ. Both of these men were of the sort 
who would rather die than lie. So far as I know nobody 
of any account denies that the stories of Matthew and 
Luke are independent of each other. That is, nobody 
claims that Luke got his story from Matthew or that 
Matthew borrowed his story from Luke. Indeed the 
critics, some of them, say that the stories contradict one 


10 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


another, so far are they from having one source. If 
you read the stories you will see that Matthew tells his 
story from the point of view of Joseph. He tells of 
Joseph’s consternation when he discovered his wife’s 
condition; his decision to put her away quietly; of the 
dreams in which God reassured him and told him what 
to do; of the way in which he became the protector of 
the mother and the child; of the dangers which threat- 
ened them, and of all the steps that Joseph took to effect 
their escape, their return, and their settlement in Naz- 
areth. We hear the story just as it fell from Joseph’s 
own lips. It is Joseph’s story that none but he could tell. 

Luke tells the story from Mary’s point of view. He 
narrates the annunciation by the angel of the fact that 
she was to be the Lord’s mother, and delicately recounts 
all her fears and hopes on account of it. He gives also 
the song of praise that Mary sang that she was so 
honoured of God as to be made the mother of His Son. 
It is without doubt Mary’s story as no one else could 
tell it. We may well say with Bishop Gore, ‘‘It is quite 
impossible to doubt that we have in these two narratives, 
the witness of Mary and the witness of Joseph.’’ 

That these two Gospels bearing their names were writ- 
ten by Matthew and Luke is not disputed by any one 
whose opinion is worth while. Professor Harnack of 
Berlin has made emphatie announcement of the genuine- 
ness of Luke’s Gospel. There has recently been raised 
some question as to the original language in which Mat- 
thew was written, and there have been some intimations 
that the Gospel we have is simply based on an earlier 
Gospel that came from Matthew’s hand. But the early 
Church accepted the Gospel as we have it as Matthew’s 
Gospel. So that we need have no concern as to its gen- 
wineness. 


THE VIRGIN BIRTH 71 


The eritics of the story make much of the fact that 
Mark says nothing about the Virgin Birth of Christ, and 
therefore they assume that Mark believed His birth was 
ordinary and natural. That is a great assumption. 
Mark not only says nothing about the manner of the 
Saviour’s birth, but says nothing about His being 
born at all, and nothing about His early years. Shall 
we therefore conclude that Mark did not believe Jesus 
was born into the world and did not appear at all until 
He began His ministry? If we are to argue from silence 
why not say that Mark did not believe Joseph could 
have been the father of Jesus. since nowhere in his Gospel 
does he even mention his name. The argument from 
silence is of very little weight. Those who are accus- 
tomed to historical research feel that there is no argu- 
ment so untrustworthy. The fact is that Mark begins his 
story with the ministry of Christ and leaves the birth 
and childhood to be told by others. But he begins the 
story he tells with the unmistakable announcement that 
it is ‘‘the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, THE 
SON OF GOD.’’ It is said also that John says nothing 
of a miraculous birth. Men who ordinarily would not 
take John’s testimony about anything make great use of 
his silence here. But John does tell of Christ’s pre- 
existence, and in such a way that Dr. William N. Clarke 
says that it well accords with the idea of a miraculous 
birth. And we must remember that John says, ‘‘The 
Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.’’ John 
makes Christ say to the Jews, ‘‘You are from beneath; 
I am from above.’’ And five times in speaking of Jesus, 
four times in his Gospel, and once in his first epistle, 
John uses that tremendously significant phrase ‘‘the 
only begotten Son of God.’’ This alone is conclusive. 
Dr. Robert E. Speer puts the case fairly when he says, 


12 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


‘‘Instead of saying ‘The story is found in only two 
Gospels’ it would be more fitting to say that ‘All the 
Gospels which deal with Jesus’ childhood tell of the Vir- 
Si biTt hs ae 

It is said also that Paul does not speak of the Virgin 
Birth in his epistles. But Paul does speak of Christ as 
‘‘the second man from heaven.’’ And he does say in a 
very significant way that Jesus Christ was ‘‘born of a 
woman, born under the law’’ alluding to His human 
motherhood, but leaving room for the common belief 
that He had no human father. It was Paul, too, who 
spoke of the preéxistence of Christ, saying that ‘‘he was 
in the form of God, but emptied himself’’ to dwell with 
us. Paul says that ‘‘though he was rich, for our sakes 
he became poor.’’?’ Again and again Paul alludes to 
Christ’s preéxistence before He came to this world, so 
that all that he says is in agreement with the fact of 
the Virgin Birth and out of agreement with ordinary 
birth. And then too it hardly can be that Paul was 
ignorant of the Virgin Birth since Luke who told the 
story so fascinatingly was his intimate friend and com- 
panion. The French skeptic Ernst Renan has called. 
the Gospel of Luke the most beautiful book in the world, 
and the story of our Lord’s nativity is one of the most 
beautiful parts of this very beautiful book. 

All the manuscripts of the Gospels that are known, 
with the exception of a Syriac version recently found, 
and a mutilated copy of Matthew in the possession of 
the Ebionites, have the story of the supernatural birth 
of the Saviour. There are hundreds of these manu- 
scripts, some of them very old and in different lan- 
guages, but these narratives of the Virgin Birth are found 
in them all. Dr. W. N. Clarke mentions that the 
earliest known fragment of the Gospels, recently found 


THE VIRGIN BIRTH 73 


in Egypt, is also a witness in favour of the miraculous 
birth of Christ. The notion that the birth narratives 
are a later growth, and inserted in the Gospels at a late 
date, is nothing but a notion and has absolutely nothing 
to support it. 

Some of the critics who reject the stories that Matthew 
and Luke tell of the birth of Christ profess to find a 
parallel between them and the birth of some of the heroes 
of Greek and Roman and Oriental history. Dr. Harry 
Emerson Fosdick did this in a much talked about ser- 
mon of his. He said flatly ‘‘the Virgin Birth is not to 
be accepted as an historic fact,’’? which is a very super- 
ficial judgment. He compares the chaste story of the 
birth of Christ with the vile story of Apollo, and the 
birth of Augustus Cesar. The ordinary listener in a con- 
gregation would not know what that story is. But Dr. 
Fosdick and others who make that comparison know. It 
would seem as though it would scorch their lips to insti- 
tute a comparison between the vile stories that the Greeks 
and Romans told of the commerce that their gods had 
with humanity and the sublime narratives in which Mat- 
thew and Luke tell of the birth of the Son of God. There 
is absolutely nothing in common between those unclean, 
grotesque inventions of men and the clean, sweet story 
of the Gospels. Indeed there is no ease in ethnic litera- 
ture of a birth from a pure virgin. And scholars are 
agreed that the Jews viewed with abhorrence the stories 
of the birth of pagan heroes as a result of the lustful 
mingling of their gods with their earthly amours, and 
the New Testament narratives have no trace of a foreign 
origin, but in their style of writing and the language 
used are more intensely Jewish than any other part of 
the Gospels. Dr. Fairbairn says of the New Testament 
account of the Saviour’s birth, ‘‘The whole story is as 


74 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


pure as the mountain air. There is nothing whatever 
of the atmosphere of legend about it. It has to be re- 
membered also that the history belongs to Jewish soil, 
upon which pagan myths never were allowed to 
flourish.’’ Listen to these lofty words in which accord- 
ing to Luke the angel Gabriel told Mary she was to be 
the Lord’s mother, ‘‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon 
thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow 
thee; therefore also that holy thing that shall be born of 
thee shall be called the Son of God.’’ The man whose 
soul does not glow with rapture and become mute with 
reverence when he hears those words is lacking in 
spiritual vitality. Luke has told his story in language 
so exquisitely beautiful, and in a manner so full of 
heavenly purity and grace that it has captivated the 
heart of the world. 

Much might be made of the argument from prophecy. 
Isaiah’s great prediction that a virgin should be the 
mother of Israel’s Messiah is notable, though the Jews 
never seem to have felt its significance. It is likely that 
the Jews expected their Messiah to come by ordinary 
birth. That is important to remember. For if the Jews 
had no expectation that their Messiah should have a 
miraculous birth, the story was not invented from a de- 
sire to satisfy Jewish expectations, as some have in- 
timated it was. But the prophecy of Isaiah is not the 
most notable prophecy of the one-sided human birth of 
our Lord. God said to the serpent who beguiled Eve 
in the garden, ‘‘T will put enmity between thee and the 
woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall 
bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel.’’ That 
is a very strange way of putting the prediction that has 
in it an implicit promise of redemption. How did it 
come that God said so explicitly that the victory of re- 


THE VIRGIN BIRTH 75 


demption should be achieved by the seed of the woman 
and does not allude to the man? It is fair to say that 
God knew what He would do and He exactly expressed 
His purpose in His promise. Have you a better ex- 


planation than that? It was the woman through whom alasny 
sin entered the world and it was through woman the Ake ced 


Redeemer would come. I cannot believe that the words 
of Genesis are the result of accident. God spoke them. 
And in the miraculous birth of Christ we find the satis- 
factory explanation of those strange words spoken at 
the beginning of the race’s history. 

But the best proof of the credibility of the wonder- 
ful story of Christ’s birth is the wonderful life He lived. 
If He had turned out to be nothing but a commonplace 
ordinary man we could not have believed that He had 
had an extraordinary birth. But the mystery of His 
birth is in full agreement with the mystery of His life. 
As Joseph Parker said in his Eeee Deus, ‘‘A common 
man could not be tolerated after so uncommon a be- 
ginning.’’? If Christ was sinless, and He was, for no 
one has yet convicted Him of sin; if He stood among 
men in the likeness of God; if John could tell us truly 
that His disciples perceived in Him the glory of the only 
begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth; if Jesus 
Christ was as John and Paul affirmed and His Church 
has ever believed, the Son of God made flesh, filled with 
all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, the second Adam 
made the new head of the race to redeem it; a miracle 
might reasonably be expected when He was born into 
the world. It is a most singular thing that an age that 
makes so much of heredity as ours does, declaring that 
children have the features, repeat the traits and dupli- 
eate the character of their parents, should not be able to 
see the necessity of a greater than human parentage for 


76 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


this being whom all ages have declared to be both the 
Son of Man and the Son of God. For the history of 
the world testifies to His divinity and thus demonstrates 
the appropriateness of an extraordinary birth. Even if 
He were only the God-sent teacher of all the ages, no one 
else is within sight of Him. As Dr. William N. Clarke 
has said, ‘‘No teacher has uttered so little that is merely 
temporary, and so much that is eternal and abiding as 
He.’’ And as Redeemer of course, He is in a class 
utterly by Himself. No one else could by any stretch 
of language be spoken of as the Redeemer of men. His- 
tory shows us that there is none other like Him; that 
in character He is unappreached and unapproachable, 
from the beginning of the world to the end of the world; 
that He stands alone, unique, supreme, without a peer, 
in what He was and what He has done for humanity. 
It is easy to believe that at the birth of such a one as 
He the heavens would open to the view of earth, and the 
angelic throng should come down and chant their celes- 
tial songs to men. It is easy to believe that such a one 
as He should come into the world in an extraordinary 
way, and be heralded by extraordinary signs. _ 

Well but, you say, is the matter of the Virgin Birth 
an important thing? Those who became His followers 
during His ministry knew nothing of it and yet they 
were faithful and true disciples. Even if they knew 
about it John and Paul did not emphasize it in their 
preaching. And there are many among us who cannot 
believe the doctrine, who yet seem to be sincere Chris- 
tian men. Is it important whether we believe it or not? 
The truthfulness of Seripture is important certainly. 
Two of the Gospels directly declare the Virgin Birth. 
Most of the rest of the book implies it. If those state- 
ments and implications are false, where does it leave us? 


THE VIRGIN BIRTH 17 


If they are not to be believed as to how Jesus Christ 
came into the world, can we believe anything they say? 
The question is inevitable, and it leaves us in a sorry 
plight. 

And if a man rejects the Virgin Birth it means that 
he has a low conception of the character of Jesus. He 
may avoid the direct confession of it. He may say that 
he fully believes that Jesus Christ is divine, but you 
will find out that he has mental reservations. He does 
not accept fully and unreservedly the conception of 
Christ presented by the whole of the New Testament. 
He will set the conception of Christ given in the Gospels 
over against that of the Epistles, and somehow twist these 
parts of the Book into imaginary contradiction of one an- 
other. He will quibble about the meaning of divinity and 
deity, and so on so that you will be in doubt as to where 
he stands. But if a man says frankly that he believes in 
the Virgin Birth, that the mother of Jesus Christ was the 
Virgin Mary and He had no human father, that He was 
the only begotten Son of God, you know very well where 
he stands on all the doctrines of grace as they are given 
in the New Testament. 

Is the doctrine of any value in our daily lives? Much 
every way. If God really came into this world in the 
person of His Son, and lived our life, and shared our 
experiences, and was tried in all points like as we are, 
that makes my whole view of the world different from 
what it could be if Jesus Christ was after all only one of 
the sons of men, and His experiences had no more rela- 
tion to mine than the experiences of any other man. Be- 
lieving in the Virgin Birth I can go about with my head 
lifted up with joy at the thought that God really did visit 
this sin-struck world of ours. The wondrous things that 
are told us about the advent of His Son are a delight to 


78 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


think upon, and though they may be a mystery they are 
not a myth but a blessed reality. The Son of God 
though He was in humiliation while here yet came with 
the signs of His heavenly origin about Him. Pity the 
men who do not rejoice in the fullness of the Gospel. 
Pity those who try to reduce the Son of God incarnate 
to the level of common humanity. Pity those who would 
take all the wonder out of life and reduce God’s world 
to a mere mechanism, and who would make it impossible 
long to believe in God as a Father since He would be 
unable to help us in the world that He Himself created. 

On one occasion Henry Acland, a friend of Michael 
Faraday, found the great chemist and natural philos- 
opher in tears with his head bowed over an open Bible. 
‘‘I fear you are feeling worse,’’ Acland said. ‘‘No,”’ 
said Faraday, ‘‘ it is not that. But why, oh why, will 
not men believe the blessed truths here revealed to 
them?’’ It is reason for tears. Pity such men you who 
believe and are happy in your faith in the Son of God. 
Pity them and pray for them. And so live before them 
that your life will help them to believe that God was 
born into the world nineteen hundred years ago in the 
person of His Son, and that He is still in the world in 
His disciples. 


V 


CAN WE BELIEVE THAT JESUS IS THE SON 
OF GOD? 


“ He saith unto them, But who say ye that I am? And Simon 
Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
living God.”—MAtTTHEW 16:15, 10. 


r SHE question as to what we think of Christ is 
fundamental to all our life. On the way we 
answer it depends our well being for this world 

and the next. This is not one of those questions, like 

‘“ Are the other worlds inhabited?’’ which we can answer 

in any way at all and have things go on just the same 

with us. If we can answer it aright as when Christ 
first asked it, our Christian faith will stand. If we an- 

swer it in any other way Christianity is doomed to a 

speedy failure. We are not asking this question specu- 

latively and out of curiosity, but we are pressed to it 
by necessity. Not only every age but every person must 
answer this question for himself. 

There never was such deep interest in the person of 
Christ as there is to-day. Voltaire thought that Chris- 
tianity had so insubstantial a basis that he threatened... 
single-handed to pull it down, but though Voltaire has | 
been dead nearly a hundred and fifty years, just as | 
surely as any body of Christian preachers discusses any~ 
point of the Apostles’ Creed with a possibility of a di- 
vision on it the newspapers still think it of sufficient 
popular interest to give it as much space as they would 
the latest piece of scandal or a sensational prize fight. 
More than twenty-five years ago Hall Caine, who was 


79 


80 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


then the most popular and the most capable of English 
novelists, said that he hoped soon to write a life of Jesus 
Christ. Though he is past seventy years old he recently 
declared that he still has that purpose in mind. And 
he has given as his reason for it that Jesus Christ is the 
one person in whom everybody is interested. Professor 
Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College, in Oxford, who 
made Plato accessible-to English readers, said that that 
work of his was but a preparation for one still greater, 
and then he said that he intended to make a study of 
the life of Christ and to answer the question that Christ 
asked about Himself on the hillside near Cesarea 
Philippi nearly nineteen hundred years ago. ‘That 
ereater work, alas, never was finished. While he was 
busy upon it Professor Jowett passed away. Adolph 
Harnack is no doubt the greatest historian of the Chris- 
tian Church who has arisen in the last fifty years. We 
are told that his classroom in Berlin always was crowded 
when he lectured. Not only students, whose interest 
might be assumed, but bankers, merchants, statesmen, 
stood about the wall to listen whenever it was announced 
he would lecture. And yet Harnack had but one theme, 
—Jesus Christ, the times in which He lived, and the 
influence He had exerted upon humanity. He began 
his book on The Beginnings of Christianity by quot- 
ing John Stuart Mill’s remark that men cannot be too 
often reminded that a man named Socrates onee lived 
among them. Harnack assents to that but he says that 
it is vastly more important that they be reminded that 
a man called Jesus Christ once stood among them. 
Then he proceeds to show that Christ’s coming into the 
world changed the intellectual and moral landscape of 
the world, and gave to men a new map of the soul. 
From the time when Jesus Christ asked His disciples 


JESUS THE SON OF GOD 81 


this question about Himself recorded in the text He 
has been the most interesting personality in the world, 
and He has never been more highly esteemed than He is 
to-day. We may fairly say that men are practically 
unanimous now in acknowledging the matchless beauty of 
Christ’s character and the matchless charm of Christ’s 
teaching. The man who feels no interest in Christ is 
not up to date. He has lagged behind thinking men. 
When Jesus Christ asked that-question about Himself 
there were only two distinct opinions about Him. The 
disciples reported that the people were saying that He 
was one of the old prophets come back; that is He was a 
man, one of the greatest of men, greater than any other 
man of that time, so great that He must have been im- 
ported into that time from some other and better age, 
but still He was only aman. They thought Him a man 
like Jeremiah who had brought a message from the other 
world, but still He was only a man. But when Jesus 
Christ asked that little group of men who had lived with 
Him and who knew Him better than anybody else in 
that day what they thought of Him, the one who was 
always the spokesman for the rest said promptly: ‘‘ Thou 
art the Christ the Son of the living God.’’ And from 
that day to this there have been only those two opinions 
about Him. It may seem as though there has been a 
great variety of opinions, but really all the different 
views that men have held about Christ are easily re- 
ducible to these two. One side says, ‘‘He was a man, 
avery great man, a very good man, greater and better 
than any other man the world has known, greater and 
better perhaps than any other man the world ever will 
know, but still He was only aman.’’ The other side says: 
‘‘He was more than man; He was the Son of God; the 
king of Israel; God manifest in the flesh; unapproached 


82 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


from the beginning of the world; unapproachable to the 
end of the world; Immanuel; God with us.’’? The one 
side while expressing unstinted admiration for Jesus, yet 
have a very inadequate conception of His character. 
The other side give Him more than admiration; they 
give Him worship. Charles Lamb had both classes in 
mind when he said: ‘‘If Shakespeare should come into 
this room where we are, we should stand to greet him. 
If Jesus Christ should come in we should fall on our 
knees before Him.’’ 

To be sure there is a great difference between men 
simply as men. That phrase ‘‘only a man’’ may de- 
seribe one who is worthy of all the reverence we can 
command. There are men and men. Some men seem 
below the brutes; others seem close to the angels. One 
word includes them all. The one word includes John 
Wilkes Booth who is beyond any words of detestation 
that we can command; and it includes Abraham Lin- 
eoln who in a half century of time is accounted by most 
of the world to be beyond any words of praise. The 
same word includes Voltaire whose stationery is said to 
have borne the words ‘‘Crush the wretch,’’ referring to 
Jesus Christ, and it includes also such a man as John 
Wesley, who tirelessly roamed over England and Amer- 
ica that he might bring the light of hope and peace into 
the lives of people who were little cared for by the rest 
of the world. It includes on the one hand Judas Iscariot, 
who sold his Lord for the price of a common slave, and 
on the other hand such a man as Paul who so loved his 
Lord that he had no desire except to please Him. There 
is an unspeakable difference between men in moral 
stature and yet the difference between the best of men 
and Jesus Christ is so immeasurable that compared with 
Him all who are merely men are on the same level. The 


JESUS THE SON OF GOD 83 


men who know Jesus Christ best perceive something in 
Him that puts a hush into their tones and reverence into 
their attitude when He approaches. 

No doubt the first thing to be done in reaching a con- 
viction about Jesus Christ is to learn what He said of 
Himself. And no one can read the words of Jesus Christ 
without seeing that He made tremendous claims for 
Himself. He separated Himself from all other men by 
such a challenge as this,_—‘‘ Which of you convineeth me 
of sin?’’ and by such a declaration as this: ‘‘I am from 
above; you are from beneath.’’ He claimed authority 
over men. Without any hesitation He declared that men 
ought to render Him obedience. He said, ‘‘Ye are my 
friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.’’ And 
again He said, ‘‘ Why eall ye me Lord, and do not the 
things which I say?’’ And yet while He claimed such 
absolute authority He professed to be meek and lowly 
in heart. But if He had no rightful authority over 
men He was not only not meek and lowly in heart but 
He was the most arrant egotist the world has ever 
known. 

He set Himself above everything that the Jews re- 
garded as sacred. He put Himself above the Bible. 
The Seriptures were reverenced then as no one rever- 
ences them now. They were studied with miscroscopic 
eare. Every bit of every letter, the dot over an I and 
the erossing of a T were looked upon as divinely inspired. 
Some one has said and justly said that even the fly specks 
on the Seriptural documents were regarded with rever- 
ence. We hardly ean conceive how holy the Scriptures 
were to the ancient Jew. And yet again and again Jesus 
Christ quoted from those Seriptures and said, ‘‘It is 
written thus and so, but I say unto you.’’ We cannot 
imagine how such words would strike the ears of the 


84 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


devout people of His time. And so we read that the 
people were astonished at His teaching because He 
taught them as one who had authority in Himself, and 
not as the Seribes who taught by quotation from other 
authorities. No Puritan ever reverenced the Sabbath 
day as the Jews of Christ’s time did, but He said, ‘‘ The 
Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.’’ He declared 
Himself greater than the greatest men of the Bible. He 
put Himself above Abraham. ‘‘Before Abraham was I 
am,’’ were His words. Abraham had been dead eighteen 
hundred years, but He declared that He existed before 
that. He set Himself above Solomon. ‘‘A greater than 
Solomon is here,’’ He said to the astonished multitude. 
He said that David, the idol of the nation, called Him 
Lord. He declared that the prerogatives of God Him- 
self belonged to Him. He said that by and by He would 
be the judge of all men. ‘‘Many will say unto me in 
that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy 
name, and in thy name done many wonderful works,”’’ 
and then He declares that He will say, ‘‘Depart from 
me, I never knew you.’’ He said that He was so iden- 
tified with God the Father that any one who had seen 
Him had seen the Father. He did not stop short of 
saying that men should worship Him, ‘‘ All men should 
honour the Son even as also they honour the Father. He 
that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father.’’ 
He claimed for Himself God’s right to forgive sin, ‘* The 
Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sin.’’ He 
said that men could come to God only through Him, 
‘““No man cometh unto the Father but by me.’’ ‘‘No 
man knoweth the Father but the Son and he to whom- 
soever the Son shall reveal him.’’? He said that in Him 
alone men could find satisfaction, ‘‘I am the way, the 
truth and the life.’’ ‘‘He that eateth of this bread shall 


‘JESUS THE SON OF GOD 85 


live forever.’’ ‘‘He that followeth me shall not walk 
in darkness.’’ ‘‘I am the resurrection and the life, who- 
soever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’’ 
‘‘Come unto me and I will give you rest.’’ ‘‘I am the 
door; by me, if any man shall enter in, he shall be 
saved.’’ He told men to pray in His name, “‘If ye 
shall ask anything in my name I will do it.”? He 
claimed to be omnipotent, ‘‘All power is given me in 
heaven and on earth.’’ He said that He was omnipres- 
ent, ‘‘Wheresoever two or three are gathered in my 
name, there am I in the midst of them,’’ and again, ‘‘Lo, 
I am with you always even to the end of the world.’’ 

Those are very great claims surely. Indeed there is 
absolutely nothing beyond them to which He could lay 
claim. The Jews were entirely right when they charged 
that He made Himself equal with God. And if what He 
said was not true the Jews were entirely right in putting 
Him to death. In doing that they were simply doing 
what the law that God gave them commanded them to 
do. Frankly I do not see how men can express admira- 
tion for Jesus Christ as the purest, wisest and best of 
men, and stop with that. 

Richard Fuller was right when he said that either 
Jesus Christ was God’s Son or He was a liar and an 
impostor. He was in the pulpit when he said that. He 
was preaching on the deity of Christ. In the midst of 
his sermon he suddenly stopped and looked up to heaven 
for a moment and said very solemnly, ‘‘Oh, Saviour, 
forgive me if in order to expose the impiety which seeks 
to tarnish Thy name, I stain my lips with language 
which my soul abhors.’’ And then looking at the people 
he said: ‘‘If Jesus Christ was only a mortal, He was not 
the purest and best, but He was the worst of men; He 
was the most presumptuous of impostors; He was a sys- 


86 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


tematic blasphemer; and as God has made blasphemy a 
capital crime, the Jews did right to condemn Him and 
crucify Him.’’ Richard Fuller was right. There is no 
escape from his conclusion. Jesus Christ made such 
exalted claims for Himself that if they were not true, 
_L.have no respect for Him. If He was not the Son of 
_- God in such a sense as no one else is, He was the most 
- colossal impostor the world has known. There are some 
“™en in our pulpits to-day and teaching in our schools, 
who boast that they are progressive thinkers and de- 
clare that their theology is ‘‘advanced,’’ and yet they 
speak of Jesus Christ as though He were only a man. 
Why should they call themselves ‘‘progressive,’’ when 
they have no more insight into the character of Jesus 
Christ than the rulers who rejected Him nineteen hun- 
dred years ago, or than the rabble that hooted at Him 
as He hung on the eross. They believed that He was 
only a man. These men of whom I speak believe no 
more. 

Richard Watson Guilder, gentle soul, one time editor of 
The Century Magazine, wrote: 

“If Jesus Christ is a man, 
And only a man, I say 


That of all mankind I will cleave to Him, 
And to Him I will cleave alway.’’ 


A beautiful spirit of devotion breathes in these lines, 
and I can conceive that a man who had heard Christ 
speak, say in giving the Sermon on the Mount, and 
was bewildered about Him might say that. I can see how 
a man who has not read the New Testament might hold 
to such ideas. But having read my New Testament and 
knowing well what Jesus Christ claimed for Himself, I. 
confess I cannot say that. If Jesus Christ is only a 
man, His testimony concerning Himself is not true, and 


JESUS THE SON OF GOD 87 


I must have a more trustworthy guide and helper than 
He is. But Mr. Gilder goes on to say, 
“If Jesus Christ is a God, 
And the only God, I swear, 


I will follow Him through heaven and hell, 
The earth, the sea, and the air.’’ 


Those words are satisfying to all who know and love the 
Saviour. | 

Add to the claims that Jesus Christ made for Him- 
self the testimony of those who stood nearest to Him. 
They not only understood clearly what He said about 
Himself, but they expressly acknowledged the truth of 
His claims. Peter said: ‘‘Thou art the Christ, the Son 
of the living God.’’ Thomas fell at His feet and said: 
‘‘My Lord and my God.’’ John said as he closed his 
Gospel: ‘‘These things are written that ye might believe 
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.’’ Paul says 
that ‘‘Every tongue shall confess that Jesus is Lord to 
the glory of God the Father,’’ and that ‘‘at the name 
of Jesus every knee shall bow of those in heaven and 
those in earth.’’ That is, everybody in heaven as well 
as everybody on earth must fall on his knees in wor- 
ship of Jesus Christ. The prophets and patriarchs will 
fall on their knees, the apostles and the martyrs on their 
knees, the angels and archangels on their knees! Be- 
fore whom? A man only? No, no, that cannot be. 
Only God ean receive such homage as that. And when 
John got a glimpse of what was going on in heaven he 
found that what Paul anticipated was true. He saw 
all heaven doing honour to Jesus Christ and singing His 
praises. Countless multitudes were there, ‘‘a multitude 
that no man could number,’’ all worshipping Him whom 
some to-day call only a man. 

And the whole course of human history since Christ 


88 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


came into the world has proved the truth of His claims. 
Gamaliel was right when he said, ‘‘If this counsel or 
this work be of men it will come to naught; but if it 
be of God ye cannot overthrow it.’? And now for nine- 
teen hundred years the claims of Jesus Christ have been 
before the world. Sect after sect has arisen that has 
looked on Jesus Christ ag a leader and a teacher, a good 
and great man, but only a man. And those sects have 
never gained any great following. Take the most famil- 
iar example. About a hundred years ago the Congrega- 
tionalists of New England split into two parts. One part 
became Unitarian; the other still worshipped Jesus 
Christ as Lord and loved Him as Saviour. The Uni- 
tarians had most of the wealth and learning. They kept 
the meeting-houses and the church endowments. They 
had such leaders as William E. Channing, Theodore 
Parker, and James Freeman Clarke. They were sup- 
ported by such brilliant literary men as Emerson, and 
Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. One is not 
surprised that they expected to win the people of this 
free land to their free churches, as they ealled them. 
But they did not. They have not grown greatly in the 
century of their existence. The Congregationalists who 
have held true to our Lord’s deity have grown to be a 
sreat army of nearly 900,000 people, and those who held 
Jesus Christ to be merely a man are still only a little 
company of slightly over a hundred thousand. Uni- 
tarians have in their Sunday Schools only 20,515 pupils, 
while the Congregationalists have an enrollment in their 
Sunday Schools of 787,564. Even in Boston the Uni- 
tarians have stood still. They do everywhere. While 
the Baptists and the Methodists, the Presbyterians and 
others who have held to the simplicity of the Gospel 
message that makes Jesus Christ all in all, have grown 


JESUS THE SON OF GOD 89 


to a combined army of over twenty millions in the 
United States aione. Reviewing the testimony of his- 
tory, then, we may say that nineteen centuries have 
passed away since Christ ascended into heaven, and all 
of them have put a crown on the head of our Lord, and 
have bowed the knee to Him. 

Many of those who have tried most strenuously to put 
aside the claims of Christ have ended by practically 
acknowledging them. David Friedrich Strauss, the un- 
believing German, did his best to reduce Jesus Christ 
to the level of other men, and declared the stories about 
His work to be nothing but myths. But when he had 
done all that he could, he declared ‘‘Christ remains the 
highest model of religion within reach of our thought 
and no perfect piety is possible without His presence 
in our heart.’’? William Lecky, the unbelieving Eng- 
lishman, was an avowed rationalist, and yet in his H1s- 
tory of Huropean Morals, he says: ‘‘It was reserved for 
Christianity to present to the world an ideal character 
which through all the changes of nineteen hundred years 
has inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned love; 
has shown itself capable of acting on all ages, nations, 
temperaments, and conditions; has been not only the 
highest pattern of virtue, but the highest incentive to 
its practice; and has exercised so deep an influence that 
it may truly be said that the simple record of those 
three short years of active life has done more to re- 
generate and soften mankind than all the disquisitions 
of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.’’ 
Ernst Renan, the unbelieving Frenehman, after doing 
his utmost to distort the facts of Christ’s life, burst out 
into an almost Christian rhapsody, and said, ‘‘ Whatso- 
ever be the surprises of the future Jesus never will be 
surpassed. His worship will grow young without ceas- 


90 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


ing; His story will call forth tears without end. His 
sufferings will melt the noblest hearts. All ages will 
proclaim that among the sons of men there is none born 
greater than Jesus.”’ 

At the beginning of His life wise men came from the 
East seeking the infant Christ. At the end of His life 
some Greeks came from the West saying, ‘‘We would 
see Jesus.’? And ever since from the north, and the 
south, and the east, and the west, men have been mak- 
ing their way to Jesus Christ, and finding in Him all 
that their hearts need. He is the dream of prophets, 
the theme of poets, the ideal of philosophers, the inspira- 
tion of artists, the help and comfort of needy men and 
women. There is nothing that suggests a parallel to 
Him anywhere. Nowhere is there a duplicate of His 
character. He stands absolutely alone in His divine per- 
fections. Never man spake like this man, and never 
man lived like Him. His purity is spotless; His gentle- 
ness is ineffable; His power to save is undeniable; His 
glory is as far beyond the glory of all others as the sun 
is superior to the mingled light of all the stars that fade 
away when the king of day appears. 

The validity of the claims of Jesus Christ is still be- 
ing demonstrated. Wherever His messengers have gone 
carrying the good news about the Saviour men have 
yielded to His power. One morning the disciples came 
to Jesus saying, ‘‘ Master, all men seek thee.’’ That soon 
will be true of all the world. Soon we shall be able to 
look up Se to heaven and say: ‘‘Dear Lord, all 
men seek Thee.’ Japan is turning to Christ. L0-daFoum 5 | 
That nation that once required all who ‘stepped from a 
vessel to her shores to trample the cross of Christ under 
foot is now lifting the cross on high. China is now 
awaking from the sleep of centuries. The old Empress 


JESUS THE SON OF GOD 91 


had the New Testament read in the schools before the 
old order passed away, and it may be said that the 
Chinese would read it more if Americans read it more. 
We hear now of a Christian General in the Chinese 
army with his men trained to Christian service. And 
long ago the Chinese people added a long list to the roll 
of those who were willing to suffer death and shame for 
Jesus’ sake. India is multiplying converts, and really 
India is held in the British Empire by her deepening 
faith in Jesus Christ. Africa, dark too long, is stretch- 
ing out her hands toward the light that is in Christ. 
Already all over the world our Lord is the centre of 
adoring millions, and the joy of unnumbered hearts. 
Each year more men acknowledge that He is the only 
hope of this world for which He shed His precious, re- 
deeming blood. The day is not far distant when Christ’s 
claims will be fully vindicated and the great prophecy 
be fulfilled that says He shall be supreme from sea to 
sea and from the river to the ends of the earth. 

But the absolutely conclusive evidence of the deity of 
Christ for each one of us is found in the renewing of 
our own hearts. There is no more positive proof than 
experience furnishes. That plain man was entirely right, 
who when he was asked what proof he had that Jesus 
Christ was divine said promptly: ‘‘Bless your heart He 
saved my soul!’’ There is no other means that men 
know anything about by which the drunkard ean be 
made sober, the debauchee can be made pure, the liar 
be made truthful. The power of Jesus Christ can do 
that, we know. Each one of us whose heart has been 
made new by divine grace has within himself the wit- 
ness of the Spirit that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. 

There is a tale which the ancient Greeks used to tell 
of Jupiter having a golden chain which at any time he 


92 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


* 


could let down from heaven and by it draw the earth and 
all its people to himself. What the ancient pagan saw 
dimly we see clearly. Jesus Christ is the golden chain 
let down from heaven once for all, by which God is 
drawing the world to Himself. There is in Jesus Christ 
a sweet loveliness, an enticing gentleness, a divine 
graciousness, that few men are able to resist if they will 
but look at them. To be able to resist the influence of 
Jesus Christ you must get away from His presence; 
and you must stop your ears to His words; you must 
shun the company of His people; you must take your- 
self away from all those who in any way have felt His 
power. So long as you listen to their testimony you 
cannot but believe. 

Take the testimony of beings animate and things in- 
animate that have come under His power. Ask them, 
as Christ asked the Pharisees, ‘‘ What think ye of Christ, 
whose son is he? ’’ Ask the star that stood over’ His 
birthplace that the wise men might know where the 
infant Saviour lay. Ask the angels who announced His 
birth to the wondering shepherds in a burst of song. 
Ask the mother who knew the secret of His birth and 
hid in her heart the wise sayings of His childhood. Ask 
the waves of Galilee that tossed mountain high but at 
His word became as smooth as a sea of glass. Ask the 
lepers whom He cleansed, the blind to whom He gave 
sight, the deaf whom He enabled to hear. Ask the dead 
whom He raised, and the bereaved to whom He restored 
their dear ones. Ask the sun which at midday drew a 
thick veil over its face out of shame for the men who 
murdered their Redeemer. Ask the dead who burst the 
bonds of the grave when He died. Ask the countless 
multitudes in every land, who through nineteen hundred 
years have found in Him the satisfaction of all their 


JESUS THE SON OF GOD 93 


yearnings, whose burdens He has lightened, whose sor- 
rows He has relieved, whose souls He has redeemed. 
Ask them, ‘‘Is He the Son of God?’’ and there breaks 
forth at once a unanimous ‘‘ Aye, aye, He is the Son of 
God, He is the Son of God.’’? The universe resounds 
with the acclamation. The flowers breathe it. The stars 
flash it forth. The angels rise from their thrones to 
announce it. In their everlasting song the redeemed on 
high celebrate it. Oh, men and women, let no ‘‘if’’ in- 
trude into your hearts about it. Say frankly to your- 
self and your neighbour, ‘‘ He is, He is the Son of God.’’ 
May you feel it thoroughly; in every fibre of your body; 
with every faculty of your mind; with all the energy 
of your soul. Living may you rejoice in it. Dying may 
you pillow your head on its blessed consolations. En- 
tering the other world may you be ready to join in the 
song that proclaims Jesus Christ King of kings and Lord 
of lords. 


VI 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES? 


“ Believe me for the very works’ sake.”—JOHN 147 II. 


HUNDRED years ago miracles held a very dif- 
ferent place in Christian thought from what 


they hold to-day. At the end of the eighteenth 
eentury when William Paley won renown by his book 
on the Hvidences of Christianity, the main argument was 
that Jesus Christ fulfilled prophecy and was able to per- 
form miracles, and therefore He must be divine. Paley 
spoke of the ‘‘splendid apparatus of the miracles.’’ But 
to-day men depreciate the miracles. Many are perplexed 
by them. Some are ashamed of them, and try to ex- 
plain them away. Not a few repudiate them altogether, 
saying as a distinguished theological professor did in his 
classroom not long ago, ‘‘Miracles are unbelievable and 
unnecessary.’’ Some who believe in them, yet are silent 
about them because they think that the truth makes a 
stronger appeal if the miraculous feature of Christ’s 
work is kept out of sight. 

But there the miracles are in the gospel narratives. 
They are given to us on the same testimony on which 
we accept the story of other parts of Christ’s life. If 
we reject one part it seems to me we must reject other 
parts as well. The miraculous element is so woven into 
every part of the New Testament that you cannot suc- 
cessfully use your penknife on it. If you cut out the 
miracles and the arguments based on them you will have 
very little left. 

There ean be no doubt that the gospel writers felt 

94 


THE MIRACLES 95 


that the miracles that Jesus did made a profound im- 
pression in His favour on the people of His day. John 
tells us that so intelligent a man as Nicodemus was con- 
vineed of His divine mission by the miracles. He said 
to our Lord on his famous night-visit to Him, ‘‘ Rabbi, 
we know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no 
man can do these miracles that thou doest except God 
be with him.’’ Just as positively Peter, on the day of 
Pentecost, declared that the miracles were Christ’s divine 
credentials. He spoke to the men of Israel of ‘‘Jesus 
of Nazareth, a man approved among you by miracles and 
wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst 
of you, as you yourselves also know.’’ Evidently Jesus 
Himself felt His miracles ought to have been convinc- 
ing arguments as to His divine authority. He under- 
took to prove His right to forgive sin by His power to 
cure disease. ‘‘That ye may know that the Son of Man 
hath power on earth to forgive sins, he saith to the 
sick of the palsy, ‘Rise, take up thy bed and go unto 
thine house.’ ’’ In denunciation of the cities of Galilee 
He said, ‘‘If the mighty works which have been done 
in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon they would 
have repented long ago in sackeloth and ashes.’’ And 
on the last night of His life He evidently thought that 
His miraculous deeds should have been a bulwark to 
the apostles’ faith strong enough to withstand even the 
shock of His ignominious death, for He said to them that 
if the truth He had spoken to them and the character 
He had exhibited to them were not sufficient to command 
their confidence they ought to believe Him ‘‘for the 
very works’ sake.’?’ Now it seems to me we must take 
the New Testament as we find it. It would be more 
honest to reject it altogether than to take what we please, 
and quietly ignore the rest. Nobody in Christ’s time 


96 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


seems to have disputed the fact that Christ was a miracle 
worker. His friends rejoiced in it. His enemies ad- 
mitted His power and put a vicious explanation on it, 
saying that He got it from the devil. The Jewish Tal- 
mud acknowledges His miraculous gifts. The first 
writer against Christianity, Celsus, who lived about 150 
years after Christ’s death, admitted His powers but at- 
tributed them to magit. Not until Hierocles wrote in 
the third century have we any serious denial that Jesus 
Christ exerted miraculous powers of a very remarkable 
kind. 

A Fellow of Oxford University has told us that at the 
end of a series of lectures on miracles that were de- 
livered there, the Professor said, ‘‘ Well, gentlemen, if 
you believe in the miracles you will be nothing better, 
and if you do not believe in them you will be nothing 
worse.’? But one cannot thoughtfully assume such an 
attitude of indifference as that. They who declare that 
miracles are impossible put fetters on God in the midst 
of His own universe. But the God and Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ is as much at home in the universe 
as a man is in his own household, and is as able to stretch 
out His hand to help His children everywhere as an 
earthly father is to put his arms about his child to ecom- 
fort it. To reject miracle is to reject Christianity, for 
no way has as yet been devised by which miracles can 
be taken out of the New Testament, and the veracity 
and authority of the New Testament still be maintained. 
Doubtless there are many good people who profess not 
to believe in miracles who yet accept the New Testa- 
ment as one of the best of books, and sincerely love and 
serve Jesus Christ, but they have not thought this thing 
out to its end, and happily their living is better than 
their thinking. 


THE MIRACLES 97 


It is not difficult to see why miracles have fallen into 
such disrepute. There have been so many counterfeits 
that they have compromised the reputation of the gen- 
uine article. Stories of the marvellous are wonderfully 
common. Sober historians like Herodotus and Livy and 
Tacitus have their tales of miraculous deeds. The Mid- 
dle Ages teem with miracles of the most extravagant 
kind, absurd to the point of folly. Brewer’s Dictionary 
of Miracles has six hundred pages of them, with many 
miracles recorded on each page. If you read them you 
will be astonished at men’s credulity. But just as men 
do not say that all money is worthless because there are 
many counterfeits, so no one is warranted in saying that 
there is no such thing as a miracle because so many 
frauds have been perpetrated. 

And a man has very little discernment if he does not 
at once detect the difference between these spurious 
miracles and those wrought by the hands of Jesus Christ. 
There are miracles and miracles. The miracles of Jesus 
Christ are seen to be different from other miracles. They 
have an air of reality about them. They have a sim- 
plicity and beauty that you do not find elsewhere. There 
was no jugglery involved in working them. Jesus mut- 
tered no incantation. He never shrouded Himself about 
with the mystery that is so dear to the professional 
necromancer. He never made a show of His great deeds. 
He did not advertise Himself. Often He bade one whom 
He helped not to tell of the miracle by which he had 
been helped. He never worked a miracle for Himself. 
He did not play the healer for pay as do the members 
of the singular cult of which we hear so much to-day. 
His wonderful deeds were always the outgo of compas- 
sion from His great heart. They always had some high 
moral end in view. And they were themselves of the 


98 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


gracious character of the God whom He came into the 
world to make known. 

Miracles are disliked to-day and the believer in mir- 
acles is held in pity or in contempt beeause this age of 
ours is in love with the orderly processes of nature, and 
a miracle is looked upon as an interruption of those 
processes. The scientifie spirit looks upon such an in- 
terruption as impossible and the very suggestion is re- 
garded as an impertinence. Dr. Augustus H. Strong 
cites Fichte’s illustration of the inviolability of nature. 
Fichte tells us to imagine a pebble swept to a high place 
on the sea beach by the strongest wave of a stormy day, 
and then he speculates upon the changes in nature which 
would have been necessary to land the pebble one foot 
further up on the sand. The wave must have been of 
greater volume and the wind that drove it of greater 
force. The state of the atmosphere which caused the 
wind must have been different and the conditions which 
gave rise to the state of atmosphere must in their turn 
have been different from what they were. There is no 
possible stopping place either in space or time. To make 
a change in the movement of that pebble conditions 
would have had to be changed not only in Africa where 
the wind that caused the wave arose, but everywhere 
else around the globe, and you cannot stop until you 
have pushed the chain of causes back to the very be- 
ginning of time. So this German philosopher argues the 
impossibility of modifying in any degree the orderly 
processes of nature. Everything, everywhere, he says, 
is in the grip of law which never relaxes its hold and 
which knows neither variableness nor shadow of turning. 
But the English philosopher, Henry Mansel, suggests the 
way out of this difficulty. He says, ‘‘Let us imagine 
that after the wind and the waves have done their work 


THE MIRACLES 99 


to the utmost I go down to the beach and lifting the 
pebble from its place I deposit it a foot further up on 
the sand.’’ That answer is complete. Very few, indeed, 
would say that human thought and will are as much 
under the control of the forces of nature as that pebble 
is. Only a pronounced materialist could say that. Only 
a fatalist of the most hopeless kind could say that. Few 
of us doubt that we have in our bosoms a power superior 
to the blind forces of nature. With old Samuel John- 
son we stamp our feet and say, ‘‘We know we’re free 
and there’s an end on it.’?’ Every day these wills of 
ours so use the laws of nature as to bring about very 
different results from what would have been had nature 
been left to herself. Every time we rise from the chair 
on which we have been sitting we direct the laws of 
nature so that they bring about a different result from 
what they would have done had we been quiet. Every 
time I stoop down and pick up a stone and hurl it up 
in the air so that it comes down a hundred fect away 
I do the same thing. Every time you carry some ob- 
ject from one place to another you make the laws of 
nature serve you. Gravitation would hold you on your 
chair; it would keep in the places where they are the 
things which you transport to some other place. But 
in what you do you are not interfering with the laws 
of nature. You are bowing to them, rather. But by 
the exertion of a superior power you are bringing about 
a different result from what unassisted nature would 
bring about. That shows the nature of a miracle. We 
do not assume that God violates the laws of nature to 
work His beneficent will for His children. The use of 
nature may be as great a wonder as any violation of 
nature could be. As Lyman Abbott once said, ‘‘Mir- 
acles are indeed supernatural, that is above nature, 


100 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


"but they are not contranatural, that is contrary to 


. nature.’’ 


“You can easily multiply for yourselves illustrations of 
how we change the course of nature. We do it every 
day. We do it every hour. Some of us live in the 
country and know the ways of a garden. Some of us live 
in the city and have a summer home and one of our de- 
lights is to tinker in a garden, to the amusement of our 
neighbours and our own instruction. For we get a great 
deal more out of those gardens than the vegetables we 
raise. Every year we use the wonderful forces of nature 
that are at work in those gardens. The ground is 
plowed and harrowed; the warm spring rains fall upon 
it; the sun shines on the soft ground; and all the seeds 
that have been blown upon it from a dozen different 
sources feel within them the stirrings of life. Some- 
thing is doing in that ground, far more than we can see. 
But left to itself nature would not bring forth the things 
that would be useful to the family that will spend the 
summer there. So we interfere in some degree with the 
ordinary course of nature. We put pieces of potato and 
grains of corn, and peas and beans and what not into 
that ground. Left to itself for a million years the 
ground would not bring forth those useful products. A 
superior power, a man’s will and a man’s hands, must 
come in and direct nature’s forces so that they work to 
beneficent ends. And I never look at the cultivated 
fields in making a journey but I think that in working 
His miracles, Jesus Christ no more interfered with the 
laws of nature than men do in producing their crops. 
And does any one mean to tell me that man ean so 
manipulate the forces of nature as to bring about the 
ends he desires and the God of nature, who made all 
things there are, must sit with His hands tied, helpless 


THE MIRACLES 101 


in the midst of the universe He made? There could not 
possibly be a more foolish suggestion than that. 

Auberlen well says, ‘‘The question whether a miracle 
is possible amounts to the query whether there is a liv- 
ing God who created the world.’’ And Thomas Hux- 
ley, that magnificent popularizer of knowledge, said, 
‘The so-called a priori arguments against theism, and 
given a deity, against the possibility of creative acts, 
appear to me to be destitute of reasonable foundation.”’ 
Even the free thinker Rousseau says in his Lettres de 
la Montagne, ‘‘Seriously to raise this question whether 
God can perform miracles would be impious if it were 
not absurd; and we should be doimg the man who 
answers it in the negative too much honour by punishing 
him for it; it would be sufficient to keep him in cus- 
tody.’’ The Psalmist, you will remember, expresses 
astonishment and represents God as being angry because 
the people of Israel thought His power limited and asked 
incredulously, ‘‘Can God furnish a table in the wilder- 
ness???’ And we are guilty not only of folly but of 
impiety as well when we say that man can so use nature’s 
laws as to make them his servants, but God must sit 
supine and helpless while His own laws work aimlessly 
on like a machine that runs but does no work for Him. 

Do not let any one delude himself into believing that 
the New Testament and science are in conflict in this 
matter of miracles. There are doubtless individual 
scientists who will tell you that stories of miracles are 
nothing but fables, but that is not the voice of science. 
Science may once have been dogmatic but to-day it is 
modest. So many mistakes have been made in the name 
of science that thoughtful men are cautious about say- 
ing anything is impossible to-day. Once men thought 
that the earth was so separated from other bodies in 


102 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


space that we could tell little about them. Comie, for 
example, said that we could not tell what any of the 
stars or planets were made of. But since his day we 
have discovered spectrum analysis, and we know of 
what substances the sun is composed and we can analyze 
the light of the stars and tell their chemical composi- 
tion. Comte was mistaken, that is all. And there is 
Laplace. He was ealled the Isaac Newton of France, 
and Fourier said of him, ‘‘He would have completed 
the science of the skies had the science been capable of 
completion.’? And yet Laplace said that stones could 
not possibly fall out of the heavens upon the earth. But 
every child who has visited the Museum of Natural His- 
tory knows that the great Laplace made a mistake when 
he said that. Men thought Professor Morse a ecrack- 
brained fool when he thought he could send a message 
fifty miles over a wire. They said it was impossible. 
It is commonplace now. We are talking hundreds of 
miles to-day without a wire. We sit in our homes in 
New York or Chicago or hundreds of miles from any- 
where, far back in the wilderness, and listen by radio 
to a concert being given in London. When the discovery 
of the X-ray was first announced I spoke of it in my 
prayer-meeting one night, and told how it was possible 
to see the bones within our flesh; a very intelligent 
school-teacher who was in the audience said quietly to 
some of the young people that it was evident that some 
one had taken the pastor in. Now X-ray examination 
is one of the commonest of things. A young man who 
looked with the surgeon when an examination of his 
father’s chest was made said, ‘‘Father, I have seen your 
heart beat.’ 

Nobody will venture to say now what is possible or 
impossible. We are doing a score of things to-day that 


THE MIRACLES 103 


fifty years ago would have been regarded as the vagaries 
of a crazy man. David Hume contended in his famous 
essay on Miracles that no amount of evidence could 
prove amiracle. But that was 150 years ago. Hume is 
out of date now. John Stuart Mill gave him his quietus. 
Mill said that all that Hume proved was that ‘‘No 
amount of evidence could prove a miracle to one who 
did not previously believe in the existence of a being or 
beings with supernatural power, or who believes himself 
to have full proof that the character of the bemg he 
recognizes is inconsistent with his having seen fit to 
interfere on the occasion in question.’’ Of course we 
know that an atheist in the very nature of the case does 
not believe in the possibility of a miracle. Of course we 
know that the man who believes that God made the world 
and then let it go without His oversight or care, does 
not believe in a miracle. And that is all that Hume 
proved. Professor Huxley frankly said in a letter to 
Lord Morley that ‘‘he was in entire agreement with the 
orthodox arguments against Hume’s a priori reason- 
ings’’ against them. Flammarion well says, ‘‘Scientifie 
Sagacity consists in being very careful how we deny the 
possibility of anything.’’ The thing to do in every case 
is to weigh the evidence. Men are under the same ob- 
ligation to do this concerning the miracles of the New 
Testament as concerning other things. The men who 
reject the miracles of the New Testament are either those 
who have not weighed the evidence fairly or who have 
begun their study with the conviction that a miracle is 
impossible. The men in Christian pulpits to-day who 
deny miracles are men who put a low estimate on the 
character of Jesus Christ. These two things are indis- 
solubly connected. 

And that leads me to say that when we know what 


104 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


sort of a person Jesus Christ was it is easy to believe 
‘He wrought miracles. He was so great Himself that 
great things were natural to Him. His deeds and His 
personality are in close relation, as of course they must 
be. A common man does common things. An extraor- 
dinary man does extraordinary things. The divine man 
does divine things. It could not be otherwise. He Him- 
self is the greatest miracle of all. He is greater than 
anything He did. That He did mighty works does not 
rest on the mere testimony of men however unanswer- 
able that testimony may be. His own character is the 
best proof that He did wonderful things. In Him was 
remarkable quality of life. In Him dwelt all the fulness 
of the Godhead bodily. Just as surely as effect follows 
cause then, must His way through the world be marked 
by exceptional deeds. They are the appropriate fruit 
of an exceptional life. His character was unparalleled 
and His deeds would naturally be unparalleled. The 
question is not whether He could work miracles but 
whether He could keep from working miracles. 

You have heard of the wonderful boy, Zerah Colburn. 
He could multiply six figures by six figures. You and 
I painfully take one figure at a time and multiply a 
single figure by it. Zerah Colburn could multiply a 
whole row of figures by the whole of the other row and 
give you the answer faster than you could set it down. 
To you and me that is miraculous. To him it was nat- 
ural because the caleulating faculty was intensified in 
him. In the same fashion the musical faculty was 
greatly intensified in Blind Tom. If you played for 
him the most intricate piece of music Tom would re- 
peat it for you on the piano though he never had heard 
it before. You and I might have to spend months in 
learning to play it as well. These are poor illustrations, 


THE MIRACLES 105 


IT know, but they at least serve to suggest that so divine 
powers were resident in Jesus Christ that what would 
be beyond our dreams even would be perfectly natural 
to Him. He did miraculous deeds because He had a 
miraculous character. 

Of course the culmination of the wonderful things He 
did in the world was His own resurrection from the 
dead. He laid down His life voluntarily, and He took 
it again. It was an exertion of His own power. That 
is the supreme miracle of all. Admit that and it carries 
all the other miracles with it. That the apostles be- 
lieved that He rose from the dead admits of no ques- 
tion. That Paul believed it no one can doubt. These 
men sealed their faith in that supreme miracle by lay- 
ing down their lives. Men do not die for a lie. The 
evidence that they died for a great truth is unimpeach- 
able if the laws of evidence mean anything. 

There are things connected with our life in this world 
which eannot be explained except as we believe that 
God has interposed in the world’s affairs. Nobody can 
explain, for example, how life came into the world. 
Men have tried to guess at it. But they have made very 
poor attempts. Science still says sternly that life comes 
only from life. The only explanation of the presence 
of life in this world is that the living God put it here. 
And that is a miracle. 

Nobody ean explain except by a miracle the con- 
science in a man’s bosom. How did men come to feel 
themselves morally responsible? Nobody can guess his 
way out of a problem like that. I am not unfamiliar 
with the explanations given in university classrooms to- 
day, but really some day they will be regarded as puerile. 
There is no satisfactory answer to the problem except by 
believing that God put that sense of accountability 


106 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


within a man and thus made him different from the 
beasts. 

Who ean explain that supreme change in a man’s 
character that we call conversion except by saying that 
it is a miracle? The converted man rightly calls him- 
self a miracle of grace. It is so great a change that the 
New Testament fitly calls it a new birth. Take the con- 
version of the river pirate, Jerry Macauley, or the jail 
bird, Michael Dunn, or the habitual drunkard, Samuel 
Hadley. Take the man whom Dr. Arthur T. Pierson 
used to tell us about who was called Rowdy Brown. He 
had killed men and somehow escaped the gallows. He 
Was vicious in all his impulses. Once he saw a man 
seated in the forecastle of a Liverpool boat, and he 
kicked the man so violently in the mouth that he knocked 
some of his teeth out, simply because the man was read- 
ing the Bible. It was pure devilishness that moved him 
to do it. When he came to New York he heard of the 
conversion of one of his pals down in the Water Street 
Mission, and he swore that he would go down there and 
if that fellow got up to speak he would take him and 
by main force would pour a bottle of whiskey down his 
throat. He meant it. He went to the mission carrying 
the bottle of whiskey with him. But there was a power 
there on which he had not counted. As the meeting 
went on he was moved. He began to tremble. He felt 
as he never had felt before. When his pal arose to 
testify he was as still as death and as pale. When the 
invitation was given he not only went forward and fell 
on his knees but he eried out, ‘‘Pray for me!’’ He 
suffered paroxysms of distress. His soul was shaken by 
the Spirit’s power. He groaned. He wept. He swayed 
to and fro in his emotion as he knelt there. He did not 
eare who saw him. For two nights the tempest swept 


THE MIRACLES 107 


through his soul, and then He who spoke peace to the 
waves of Galilee spoke to him, and there was a great 
calm in his soul. He was made over. He sat at the 
Saviour’s feet clothed and in his right mind. He loved 
the things that one week before he had hated. He hated 
the things that a week before he loved. He praised 
Jesus Christ to everybody he met. He was so anxious 
to have his old associates saved that he used to take them 
up bodily and carry them into the meeting and set them 
down on the anxious seat, and then he would pray for 
them so earnestly that they were melted by the fervency 
of his pleadings. How do you explain a change like 
that? No philosophy can do it. That such changes are 
wrought cannot be denied. And the only rational ex- 
planation of them is that the Saviour whose power 
opened the eyes of the blind, and unstopped the ears 
of the deaf, and gave cleansing to the leper and brought 
back the dead to life nineteen hundred years ago is in 
the world still. His hand is still stretched ont in miracle 
working. We know it. We have felt its touch ourselves, 
and have experienced within us its almighty power. 

And what He has saved He will keep. Have no fear 
about it. His power is not shortened. His ear is not 
heavy. He can feed hungry souls still as He fed the 
five thousand. He ean still our unquiet lives as He 
stilled Tiberias. He can make us pure as He made the 
leper’s flesh come back to him as sweet and fresh as the 
flesh of a little child. He can hold us up as He rescued 
Peter sinking into the wave. He will not leave us nor 
forsake us. He will keep us to the end. He will com- 
fort us in the dark valley so that we shall know that 
He has conquered death indeed, and He will raise us up 
again to sit with Him in heavenly places. 


VEL 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE ATONEMENT? 


“The preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolish- 
ness; but to us which are saved tt is the power of God.”— 
I CORINTHIANS 1: 18. 


HAT verse was written nearly nineteen hundred 
years ago in a land nearly seven thousand miles 
away. It sounds as though it was written in 
America last week. Paul is undertaking here to say 
what the heart of the Gospel is and to tell how it was 
regarded by some who heard it in his day. What the 
heart of the Gospel was Paul had not the slightest doubt. 
It was the preaching of the cross. He was so sure he 
was right about it that he said that if any one, though 
he was an angel from heaven, should preach any other 
gospel, he should be accursed. 

From the beginning to the end of his wide ministry 
Paul preached only one Gospel without any slightest 
deviation. Wherever he went, whether he spoke to king, 
or priests, to scholars or the populace, Paul not only 
preached Jesus Christ, but this particular aspect of 
Christ,—Christ crucified. It was always the same thing. 
*‘T determined to know nothing among you save Jesus 
Christ and him ecrucified.”? Just as Paganini went all 
over Europe drawing his music from one string of a 
violin so Paul sought to charm men and to draw them 
to Jesus Christ by harping on this one theme, what Jesus 
Christ did for men when He died on the cross and what 
the cross of Jesus Christ should move us to do for Him. 
It is said of Alfred Cookman that he lived within a circle 

108 


THE ATONEMENT 109 


no point of which was more than three feet from the 
cross of Christ. It is a blessed place of residence. Paul 
dwelt there. 

See how uniform Paul’s message is. Hear how he is 
always ringing the changes on the one theme. Some one 
sounds it out, ‘‘I delivered unto you first of all that 
which I also received, that Christ died for our sins 
according to the Scriptures.’’ That is Paul speaking. 
**Ye are bought with a price,’’ it is Paul speaking again. 
‘“When we were yet without strength Christ died for the 
ungodly,’’ that is Paul speaking. I do not need any one 
to suggest it to me. I know the accent of it. ‘‘God 
commendeth his love toward us in that while we were 
yet sinners Christ died for us,’’—it is Paul again with- 
out any doubt. 

But so it is with the other apostles. There is only 
one Gospel preached in the whole New Testament. We 
talk a great deal about different aspects of Christ, 
especially as presented by the different writers of the 
New Testament. We talk learnedly about ‘‘The Christ 
of the Synoptics,’’ “‘The Christ of St. John,’’ ‘‘The 
Christ of the Apocalypse,’’ ‘‘The Christ of the Creeds,’’ 
‘“‘The Christ of Yesterday,’’ ‘‘The Christ of To-day,’’ 
and ‘‘The Christ that is to Be.’’ They ought to be one 
and the same. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to- 
day and forever. So far as the apostles are concerned 
they are the same. I hear one say, ‘‘ Who his own self 
bare our sins in his own body on the tree.’’ Who is it 
speaking? It sounds like Paul. No, it is Peter. Listen 
again, ‘‘The blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanseth us 
from all sin.’’ Is it Paul? It sounds like him. No. 
Is it Peter? It has his accent. No, it is John. It is 
all one thing no matter what apostle speaks. There is 
only one gospel in the New Testament. 


110 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


But Paul speaks of some who rejected this gospel and 
undertook to preach another gospel. We are a little too 
apt to think that this spiritual malady of preaching some 
other gospel is peculiar to our time. Oh no! every age 
has had people to whom the cross of Christ was an 
offence. In his letter to the Galatians Paul speaks of 
the ‘‘offence of the cross,’’? and in his letter to the 
Corinthians he says that the preaching of the cross was 
‘‘foolishness’’ to some. And you know that when we 
read the Epistles to the Galatians and the Corinthians 
we are within twenty-five or thirty years only of the 
erucifixion of Christ. So early in Christian history 
were there those who had a distaste for the eross. It is 
true that Paul and the other apostles made the cross 
the centre of all their preaching, but even in that day 
there were those who were preaching something else. 
There were congregations that demanded something 
else. The preaching of the cross made the Jews angry: 
it made the Greeks scoff: it made the Romans smile. 
And there are always preachers who are ready to say 
just the word that is in demand. Paul was not of that 
sort. He delivered the message that God commanded 
him to deliver, and he spoke the word that he felt men 
needed whether men liked it or not. He said in a letter 
he wrote to one of the churches he founded, ‘‘ Other men 
may preach what they please but we preach Christ 
erucified.’’ 

And Paul’s example is a good one to follow. For 
really and truly there is nothing else in the world worth 
preaching. Some preach politics, but a sermon on 
politics never comforted the sorrowing or saved the lost. 
Some preach social economics, but the pulpit that is 
given to sociological discussions is not the one that brings 
to whiteness and purity the community that is black with 


THE ATONEMENT 111 


sin. Some preach on current events, and forget to point 
out that an event that occurred nineteen hundred years 
ago on a hill seven thousand miles from America’s 
shores, is the event that gives significance to all the 
events of to-day and determines for every one of us the 
issues of eternity as well. 

There was another falling away from the preaching of 
the cross in the days of what was called ‘‘Moderatism’’ 
in Scotland. After ten years of conflict the Church of 
Scotland was disrupted in 1843. Of her twelve hundred 
ministers nearly five hundred left her; all her mis- 
sionaries left her but one; a full third of her members 
deserted her; so many were true to their faith as against 
the Establishment that many churches stood empty in 
Edinburgh. It was a time of heart-rending sorrow to 
those who were thus exiled from the church of their 
fathers. The old Covenanter who ‘‘cam oot’’ in 743 is 
described as sitting in his later days with his golden- 
haired granddaughter by his side and saying to her: 

“There’s nae gospel noo, lassie, 
There’s nae covenant blood, 
There’s nae altar noo, lassie, 
There’s nae Lamb o’ God.” 
Then he strokes the curls of the child and his quaver- 
ing voice goes on: 
“There’s nae Chalmers noo, lassie, 
There’s nae guid McCheyne, 
And the dear, dear Cross they preached, lassie, 
The dear, dear Cross is gane.” 
And the snowy white head bows lower and lower, and 
the eyes fill with tears, as the old man says: 
“Folk dinna want the cross, lassie, 
They've cutien doon the tree, 


And naebody believes in tt, 
But fools like you and me, 


112 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


Yes, there was a falling away from the preaching of 
the cross in the days of what was called Moderatism 
in Scotland. 

We had another ‘‘falling away’’ in the defection that 
took place in the Congregational churches of New Eng- 
land nearly a hundred years ago, when a large body of 
the people went over to Unitarianism. And they were 
not willing to go out, cherishing their faith, and giving 
and suffering for it as the Covenanters did, but they 
seized and held the meeting-houses, and other property 
of the churches, that were given by those who believed 
in the cross, and given for upholding the preaching of 
the cross. More than eighty churches were rent asunder ; 
three thousand nine hundred members finding their 
Saviour wounded in the house of His friends withdrew, 
and the more than twelve hundred Unitarians who re- 
mained, took possession of the property of the churches 
to the value of six hundred thousand dollars, a sum 
vastly greater then than that would be now. 

And it need not surprise us that we are passing 
through such a period of trial again. It is no new thing. 
It has come upon the church many times before. It cer- 
tainly is upon us now. Look at our recent hymnals and 
you will find evidence of this. Hymns about the atone- 
ment are few indeed. ‘‘There is a fountain filled with 
blood,’’ ‘‘ Alas, and did my Saviour bleed!’’ and all 
hymns like them are eliminated. We are told that those 
figures are too gross for the taste of the present day. 
That is one reason why when we erected our splendid 
new meeting-house we selected no new hymnal for it, but 
we got a new supply of a hymnal thirty years old, be- 
cause it sets forth the evangelical faith in unmistakable 
terms. It glorifies the cross as Paul did. 

In Paul’s day when men revolted against the preach- 


THE ATONEMENT 113 


ing of the cross they suggested other ways of salvation. 
They are doing it to-day. It is being done in pulpits 
that are called Christian. Men are being trained to 
preach these false gospels in seminaries that were 
founded to defend the Christian faith, by teachers who 
pledged themselves to instruct young men in Scriptural 
truth. In a thousand subtle and plausible ways the 
Gospel that Paul preached is being denied, and even de- 
rided as fit only for African savages, and the authority of 
Paul to preach his Gospel at all is being impugned. I 
sometimes wonder what the chief of the apostles would 
say if he could sit in some of our churches and hear the 
Gospel of Jesus Christ perverted, or could listen to men 
in our theological seminaries pooh-poohing what he de- 
elared was the only thing worth calling a Gospel. 

Now let us examine the substitutes for Paul’s Gospel 
which men propose. Some time ago walking on North 
Broad Street in Philadelphia I saw a tablet set up in 
front of a church, that professed to give the creed of 
the people who worship there. There were two things 
stated clearly in that creed. Jesus was a teacher, that 
was set forth there. Jesus was our example, that was 
there. That was all. There was not a single word about 
Jesus Christ beyond that. How much of a gospel is 
that? Is that all the gospel you need? Let us look at it. 

This is the first proposition: Jesus Christ saves us by 
teaching us the truth. He knew more about God than 
anybody else; and He has revealed God to us as one 
who loves us; and if we live according to His teaching 
we shall come to the end of life in safety. It must be 
said that there is an air of reasonableness about that. 
One who does all that for us may in some sense be ealled 
a Saviour to us. 

Sitting on the piazza of our simple summer home on 


114 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


the Rhode Island shore, looking out over the sea at night 
as we look to the east we can see Point Judith light, 
‘*Pint Judy’’ as the old Rhode Islander calls it. To the 
southeast we can see the Block Island light and the gas 
buoy off Block Island. Directly south we can see Mon- 
tauk Point flashing its intermittent light over twenty 
miles of water. To the west you can get now and then a 
glimpse of the light at Watch Hill. Now the men who 
reared those lighthouses showing the man at the ship’s 
wheel where the places of danger are along the coast, 
and pointing out the channels in which it is safe to 
steer, may fairly be regarded as having done the work 
of a saviour. But for them many a ship would have 
been wrecked and many a poor mariner would have 
found a watery grave. In some such sense as that, we 
are told Christ saves us. He has revealed to us the truth 
by which we should live; He has pointed out the way 
in which we should go; and if we live in obedience to 
Him, we should reach heaven in safety. 

But it does not take a second thought to see that if 
that is all that Christ has done for us He is not the 
only Saviour, as the Scriptures declare Him to be. Men 
were not dying for the lack of teachers when Jesus 
Christ came into the world. Almost all that Christ said 
had been said before. His mind was saturated with the 
teaching of the old Jewish prophets. Even Christ’s 
specialty that God is love, men had in erystalline clear- 
ness before. They did not need any new messenger to 
teach them that God is love. The Old Testament is full 
of that. What does this mean, ‘‘The Lord is merciful 
and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in merecy’’? 
That is in the Old Testament. Hear this, ‘‘Like as a 
father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that 
fear him.’’ That, too, is in the Old Testament. Again, 


THE ATONEMENT 115 


*“As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I com- 
fort you.’’ That is in the Old Testament. Can any- 
thing outgo this, ‘“‘Can a mother forget her nursing 
child? Yea, she may forget, yet will I not forget thee’’? 
But that is a declaration of the Old Testament. Any- 
body who will read the Old Testament will see that it 
is full of messages that tell:men of God’s love. I very 
much wish that men who form theories about the Bible 
would now and then read the Bible at least for a few 
minutes to find out what is really there. 

Many other men pointed out the way of life. Moses 
did. Nothing that Christ ever said went beyond this: 
‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind 
and heart and soul and strength, and thy neighbour as 
thyself.’? Even Christ said that any one who did that 
should live. But Moses spoke those words fifteen hun- 
dred years before Christ came among men. Moses de- 
clared the truth. The prophets did. The apostles did, 
and all the line of holy men through whom God declared 
His will to men. Some of them did more of this work 
than Christ Himself did. Christ wrote no book. He sent 
no epistle about among the churches to be read for their 
instruction. The words that actually fell from His lips 
that have come down to us make up only twenty or 
thirty pages of the New Testament. If salvation is 
wrought for us by giving us the truth why are not these 
men who did so much of it set forth as the saviours 
of men and the redeemers of sinners? But where is 
there any slightest hint that Moses stands in any such 
relation? I have read numerous books that bear such 
titles as these,—‘‘The Gospel in the Psalms,’’ ‘‘The 
Gospel in Ezekiel,’’ ‘‘The Gospel in Isaiah,’’ and the 
like. And the Gospel is there. Those men taught gospel 
truth, and pointed out the way of salvation. But where 


116 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


are David and Isaiah and Ezekiel set forth as the 
saviours of men, because they were faithful teachers of 
God’s truth? Peter so taught the truth one day that 
three thousand people were converted under the one 
sermon, but nobody that day or at any time since has 
said we must believe on Peter to have everlasting life. 
Indeed Peter insisted as stoutly as Paul ever did that 
‘‘there is none other-name under heaven given among 
men whereby we must be saved’’ except the name of 
Jesus Christ. 

No man ever worked to save men as Paul did. In 
teaching and preaching he was absolutely without a peer. 
But though his teachings have shaped the thinking of 
the Church for nineteen hundred years yet in all that 
time no one has intimated that by believing on Paul you 
could be saved. But look for yourselves and see how 
much Paul did in teaching God’s truth compared with 
what Jesus Christ did as a teacher. Jesus Christ taught 
three years; Paul taught thirty years. Christ never 
went outside of His own little country except onee, and 
then He went just over the border; Paul went to the 
ends of the earth in his missionary zeal. Jesus Christ 
restricted His ministry to the Jews; Paul preached to 
everybody, Jew and Gentile, Greek and _ barbarian, 
Roman, Scythian, bond and free. Christ gathered only 
a handful of converts; Paul had a multitude, and he 
planted churches throughout Asia Minor and through 
the countries of southern Europe. 

But for all this you never find Paul instituting any 
comparison between the work that Christ did and the 
work that he did. He recognized that they were in dif- 
ferent classes. Paul taught men. Christ was more than 
a teacher. In the presence of other men Paul stood 
erect. He declared that he was no whit behind the 


THE ATONEMENT 117 


chief of the apostles. But in the presence of Christ 
he esteemed himself as nothing. He bowed low at His 
feet and adored Him just as the sinful woman did who 
washed those feet with her penitential tears and wiped 
them with the hairs of her head. Paul always said that 
he was Christ’s slave. He would do anything for Christ. 
He went to jail for Him. He wore chains for Him. He 
was proud to do it. No woman ever was half so proud 
of her jewels as Paul was of the fetters he wore for 
Christ’s sake as he stood before kings. He went over 
in his mind the sufferings he endured for the Saviour 
much as a lover might recount the gifts he had made to 
his sweetheart. He was beaten, he was scourged, and 
stoned, and shipwrecked, thrown to the lions, and put 
to the sword and suffered the loss of all things for 
Christ’s sake. And he could easily bear it all. But 
there was one thing that you and I do not think so much 
about that Paul could not bear. He trembled with ex- 
eitement, he was grieved and horror-struck when any one 
dared to put Paul on a level with Paul’s Master. When 
the Corinthian church was split into factions, one group 
saying, ‘‘I am of Paul,’’ another, ‘‘I am of Apollos,”’ a 
initrd.) beams ot Cephas,’’..and a. fourth, ““I am) of 
Christ,’’ as though they were all teachers and nothing 
else, Paul turned upon them and said, ‘‘Was Paul eru- 
cified for you? or were you baptized in the name of 
Paul?’’ Others may talk as they please about a mere 
revelation of truth saving us, but evidently Paul looked 
to something else. And Paul knew. 

One other thing is stated on that tablet on which the 
ehureh of which I have spoken had inscribed its ereed. 
It said that Christ is our example. Christ saves us not 
simply by teaching us the truth but by showing us how 
to live the truth. Without doubt He is our example. He 


118 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


said, ‘‘I have given you an example, that ye should do 
as I have done to you.’’ And it is not easy to furnish 
others an example of right conduct. Shakespeare says 
significantly, ‘‘I could easier teach twenty what were 
good to be done than be one of the twenty to follow 
mine own teaching.’’ It must be admitted that one who 
sets us a perfect example of right living, one who goes 
before us in life’s journey and shows us the way in 
which we ought to walk, is in a sense a saviour. 

Some years ago we were spending the summer in the 
White Mountains. Some of us were eager to climb 
Mount Lafayette. The keeper of the hotel where we 
were staying besought us to take a good guide. He said 
that only the year before a man started out from his 
hotel to make that climb. He went alone and he never 
came back. His dear ones were almost crazed with grief, 
and the whole community was shocked. They could only 
conjecture what had happened to him. He may have 
fallen into some ravine and perished. He may have been 
attacked by some wild creature. He may have be- 
come bewildered in the woods and died of exhaustion. 
Now in such a case as that, the guide who leads you in 
the right way is in a sense your saviour from suffer- 
ing and perhaps death. But for him you might have 
dropped into some pitfall and your unburied body have 
been left to rot and your bones to bleach in the forest 
wilderness. In some such way as that, men say, Jesus 
Christ saves us. He sets us such a fine example of right 
living, and patient suffering, and holy dying, that by 
closely following Him we reach heaven at last. 

What do you think of that? Is that the sort of gospel 
you need? Alas for me, if that is all the good news 
that Jesus Christ has to give me. For I am not simply 
in danger of falling. I am already fallen. I am not 


THE ATONEMENT 119 


simply in danger of being lost. I am already lost, lost 
and undone by sin. What I need is some arm long 
enough and strong enough to reach down to where I am, 
and by main force to lift me out of the horrible pit and 
the miry clay into which I have fallen and set my feet 
upon a rock. What I need is some one who, lke the 
shepherd of whom the Saviour Himself told us, will go 
out into the wilderness where I am lost, and seek and 
seek and seek until he finds me and brings me with re- 
joicing to the safety and comfort of the fold. Follow 
His example? Tread in His footsteps? Walk as He, 
the only begotten Son of God walked? Why, there never 
was another like Him. He lived for thirty years in the 
midst of corruption, absolutely uncorrupted. He was 
the dear friend of sinners, and publicans and harlots, 
and yet He took none of their stains on His character, 
and He left the world holy, harmless and undefiled. 
Who else can do that? Who of us lives twenty-four 
hours without sin? Who of us after his best day does 
not need to get down on his knees and ery out, ‘* Wash 
me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from 
my sin.’’ Follow His example to be sure; walk as He 
walked; copy to the full the example He set us, but 
when we have done our best we shall see only the more 
clearly that our only hope is in the mercy of God the 
Father and the blood of Christ the Son. 

Anybody who will read the New Testament ean easily 
see that the one and only salvation that it proclaims is 
neither of these ways that men propose. It is a salva- 
tion by atoning blood. Blood paid our debt. Blood 
sealed our pardon. Blood washed away our pollution. 
We were redeemed not with corruptible things as silver 
and gold but with the precious blood of God’s Son. 
We were to die, justly condemned for our sins, and He 


120 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


who was sinless took our place and died in our stead, 
and by His death we live. That is the gospel of the Lord 
Jesus Christ, and that is the whole of it, and they who 
mislead poor human creatures by preaching some other 
gospel deserve to be execrated. Really this modern so- 
called gospel is nothing but old-time infidelity. David 
Friedrich Strauss who by his Leben Jesu has been lead- 
ing men astray for a hundred years, said just as the 
preachers of this modernist gospel of to-day do, ‘‘ Jesus 
is not a Saviour by His atoning death but by His teach- 
ing and example which exercise an elevating and there- 
fore a redeeming influence upon us all; men are justified 
not through faith in another’s righteousness but by 
faithfulness to their own conviction, that is, by the 
earnest endeavour always to shape action by a recognized 
standard of duty.’’ If that is all the gospel Jesus Christ 
brought to us, He brought no gospel at all. The final 
and complete proof that the gospel of the New Testa- 
ment is divine is that it exactly suits the needs of all 
God’s ereatures. If we substitute for the gospel of a 
erucified Christ this ‘‘other’’ gospel of ‘‘turn over a 
new leaf and save yourself,’’ we have no message at all 
for a great multitude who sorely need a Saviour’s com- 
passion. 

Dr. Charles Berry, the famous preacher of Wolver- 
hampton, England, who was invited to be the successor 
of Henry Ward Beecher in Plymouth Pulpit, Brooklyn, 
once told his friend, Dr. J. H. Jowett, how he learned 
the sort of salvation that men needed. He said that one 
night there came to his door in Wolverhampton, a Lan- 
eashire girl with a shawl about her head and clogs on 
her feet. Dr. Berry went to the door himself. The girl 
said, ‘‘Be you the meenister? ’’ Dr. Berry said that he 
was. She said, ‘‘I want ye to come and get my mother 


THE ATONEMENT 121 


in.’’ Dr. Berry thought it was a case of drunkenness 


and that the girl wanted her mother taken care of, so 
he said to her that she had better go to the police station. 
From the horrified look on the girl’s face he saw that 
he had made a mistake. She said, ‘‘No, my mother is 
dying and I want ye to come and get her into salva- 
tion.’? And by the way, that is a fine phrase that poor 
girl coined in her distress, ‘‘get her into salvation.’’ It 
will bear study. Dr. Berry said, ‘‘How far away do you 
live?’’ The girl said, ‘‘A mile and a half from here.’’ 
‘‘Ts there no minister nearer?’’ he asked. She said, 
‘‘Yes, but I wanted you, and won’t ye come? ’’ Dr. 
Berry could not resist that appeal and he went with her. 
He found that the house to which the girl took him was 
a house of ill fame. In the lower stories men and women 
were drinking and roystering. They went to the top 
floor and there just as the girl had said, a woman lay 
dying. Dr. Berry sat down by her side and told her 
how God’s Son came from heaven and taught us how 
to live and set us a beautiful example to help us. The 
woman listened for a while and then bewildered she 
looked at him out of her eyes of death and said, ‘*‘But, 
Mister, that’s no good for the likes 0’ me. I’m a dying 
sinner, don’t ye see?’’ There he sat by the side of a 
dying sinner, and he 2 minister of the Gospel, had noth- 
ing to tell her. Then he thought of the simple story 
that his mother told him in his childhood, of how God’s 
only Son came from heaven, and took our place as 
sinners and died for us, and saved us. It was a much 
more primitive gospel than he had been preaching from 
his pulpit. But he told it to this poor woman just as 
his mother told it to him. And as he told it she fastened 
her eyes on him and reached her hand toward him and 
said eagerly, ‘‘Now you’re getting at it, that’s what I 


122 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


need.’’ And when Dr. Berry told the story to his friend, 
Dr. Jowett, he said, ‘‘I got her in that night, and what’s 
more, I got in myself, and ever since that night I have 
had a full gospel for lost sinners.’’ ‘There is nothing 
else in all the world in the least like it. It is like the 
music of heaven itself. Have the other gospels that men 
offer anything to compare with it? Well, then, we would 
say with Paul, ‘‘Let others preach what they please, we 
preach Christ crucified,’’ and we rejoice in that saying 
on which Paul rested his heart that ‘‘Christ Jesus came 
into the world to save sinners.’’ 


VIIl 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE RESURRECTION OF 
CHRIST? 


“He showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible 
proofs.”,—Acts 1: 3. 

AM willing to rest all my Christian faith on the 
| single fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

That Christ rose from the dead is fundamental to 
all that Christian people believe. If that is not true 
nothing that I preach is true. If Christ did not rise 
from the dead the whole structure of our faith falls just 
as surely as a building will topple if you recklessly dig 
the foundation from under it. Professor Huxley said 
that it is very foolish for Christian people to stake their 
religion on one fact and that a fact that it is so difficult 
to accept. But I will do precisely that, and I have no 
hesitation in declaring that that is precisely what the 
New Testament does. It rests everything on the one fact 
of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

In every age there have been some men who have been 
skeptical about the possibility of a resurrection. King 
Agrippa, sitting before the Apostle Paul, professed to 
believe in a resurrection, and yet when he was con- 
fronted with the concrete fact of a resurrection he was 
so doubtful that Paul made special appeal to him and 
asked why a resurrection should seem a thing incredible 
to him. The question that Paul put to Agrippa I wish 
to put to each one of you. Why should you think a 
resurrection from the dead incredible? 

When I say that Christ rose from the dead I mean 
just that. Many Christian preachers are saying to-day 

123 


124 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


that the resurrection means simply that life continues 
after death. It means nothing of the sort. The writers 
of the four Gospels when they described the resurrec- 
tion of Christ meant just what we mean by a resurrec- 
tion. Paul, when he said that Christ arose, meant that 
the very body that was put into the grave came out of 
the grave, still bearing the marks by which you could 
tell that it had hung on the eross. The New Testament 
writers never juggled with the words they used. There 
is not a place in the New Testament where the resur- 
rection is spoken of where it does not mean that the 
dead body became alive again. Nobody took it to mean . 
simply that the soul lived on. They did not under- 
stand a resurrection to mean the deliverance of the soul 
at the dissolution of the body. We do not mean that 
now by a resurrection. They did not then. Indeed that 
is what we mean by death, and not resurrection. When 
some of the Roman soldiers who watched the tomb ran 
and told the priests what had happened they were not 
talking about the disembodied soul of Christ, they were 
talking about His body. Any one who tries to make 
Christ’s resurrection mean anything else than a restora- 
tion to life of the body that was dead is not honest, or 
else he has not the sense to understand plain language. 

Certainly a Christ who died and was buried and never 
came out of the grave is not the Christ that the New 
Testament tells us about. He is not the Christ whom 
men have believed in for nineteen hundred years. The 
marvel to me is that the man who does not believe the 
plain statement of Scripture that Christ rose from the 
dead can continue to preach. I would rather my arm 
should hang palsied by my side, and my tongue cleave 
to the roof of my mouth and I be forever helpless and 
speechless than to stand in a pulpit dedicated to preach- 


THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 125 


ing the Gospel and declare there that the Word of God 
is a lie; that the apostles may have believed that Christ 
arose, but they were mistaken; that Christ may have 
thought that He would rise, but He never did. When 
I must twist and turn the New Testament doctrines be- 
fore I can accept them, I will do as any honest man 
ought to do. I will get out of the pulpit and I will 
not enter it again until I can be loyal to the truth which 
Jesus Christ commissions me to preach. 

Men are declaring in extenuation of their unbelief 
that no amount of evidence is sufficient to prove the 
resurrection of Christ. But the question of evidence is 
not a complex one, but a very simple one. And there 
are no two questions on which testimony is more conclu- 
sive than these two,—as to whether a man is dead, and 
whether a man is alive. Those are the two questions we 
have to deal with here. First, did Jesus Christ die? 
Second, was Jesus Christ afterwards alive again? 

1. First, then, did Jesus Christ really die? 

We often have to prove death. Every time payment 
is claimed on an insurance policy we have to prove death, 
and it is usually a very simple matter. And proof of the 
death of Jesus Christ could not be more complete than 
it is. No one who pretends to be sane could think of 
denying that Jesus Christ died. Men once tried to say 
that Jesus did not die but swooned away from exhaustion 
while on the cross and in that condition was put into 
the tomb and afterwards revived and appeared to His 
disciples. But nobody believes such nonsense now, and 
it is doubtful whether any one ever really believed it. 
Christ died in public not in private. There could be no 
simulation of death as He hung up there in sight of all. 
He died by violence too, and men who set out to kill 
accomplish their purpose if they are not interfered 


126 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


with. His friends admitted His death; they had hoped 
against hope that He would not die, but they had to 
admit His death, and they were overwhelmed by it. 
They saw the look of death on His face; they heard His 
last words; they knew that He was dead. His enemies 
made sure that He was dead. They stood taunting Him 
as long as He lived, and when His ears could no longer 
hear the taunts, they went away triumphant in the 
thought that they had shown Him to be an impostor. 

And then the soldiers were professional executioners. 
They were used to seeing men die. They knew the signs 
of death. They were as familiar with the signs of dis- 
solution as any physician in the world, and they pro- 
nounced Him dead. One of them to make sure of it 
plunged a spear into His side. That is Christ’s death 
certificate to all ages. That alone disposes of the swoon 
theory. And that act has enabled the modern scientific 
physician to state exactly the cause of His death. The 
blood and water that came out after the stab of the 
spear are a sign that Christ died of a ruptured heart. 
His great heart broke under the weight of the world’s 
sin. Death was not due to the nails, though they were 
driven through His hands and His feet. It was not the 
spear that killed Him. He was already dead when the 
soldier thrust the spear into His side. He died of a 
broken heart. He was certainly dead. If ever any- 
thing was proved, that has been. The Lord of life was 
dead. Death had won its greatest victory. But it was 
only an apparent victory. Bunker Hill seemed to be a 
victory for the British. But it was the dearest victory 
they ever won. On the surface it was victory, at the 
heart of it was defeat. So it was on Calvary. Christ 
was dead, but by submitting to death He conquered 
death and came back to life. 


THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 127 


That is the second thing we have to prove, that Jesus 
Christ came back to life. And the proof that He was 
dead is no more conclusive than the proof that He was 
alive again. Nobody expected to see Him arise. They 
thought it was all over with Him. His enemies ex- 
ulted. His friends were in despair. Some who loved 
Him went to embalm the body, when to their aston- 
ishment they saw Him alive. They could not under- 
stand it. But there He stood before them. Some re- 
fused to believe on the testimony of those who had seen 
Him. But He came to them and submitted to their 
serutiny, and like Thomas they fell on their knees be- 
fore Him erying, ‘‘My Lord, and my God.’’ What was 
it that changed the convictions of those men who could 
not and would not believe? They were not likely to be 
deceived. They saw Him alive, no doubt of that. They 
saw Him not only in a passing glimpse, but again and 
again through forty days of time. They talked with 
Him; they walked with Him; they ate with Him. Five 
hundred saw Him at once. For forty days, to many 
witnesses, He showed Himself alive by many unimpeach- 
able proofs. 

Certainly something remarkable happened to these 
men after their Master was crucified. From abject de- 
spair they were lifted into exultation; from weakness 
unspeakable they were lifted into strength. They were 
hiding in corners, in out-of-the-way places, for fear of 
their enemies, when suddenly they became as bold as 
lions. They dared to set themselves up in opposition 
to Rome even. It was like setting up an eggshell to 
resist an attack of one of our great modern guns, to 
expect these discouraged, untutored men to withstand 
the power of imperial Rome, the proud mistress of the 
world. But somehow they got courage for that. They 


128 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


predicted Rome’s downfall. They said that the simple 
story they had to tell would conquer the world. Some- 
thing brought about the marvellous change that took 
place in these men. Something brought together the men 
who seattered after the crucifixion, and held them to- 
gether. Something turned timidity into such courage 
as the world never saw. They went everywhere telling 
their story, and they stood ready to seal their testimony 
with their life blood, as indeed most of them did. 
There is no explanation of this except that the apostles 
told the truth. Christianity never could have come out 
of the grave in which Jesus Christ continued to lie dead. 
Matthew Arnold, the unbelieving poet, sang: 
** Far hence He lies, in some lone Syrian town 


And on His grave with shining eyes 
The Syrian stars look down.”’ 


But it is foolish to sing so. If Christ’s body were still 
in the grave His cause would be theretoo. Judas thought 
His cause was dead. The Jews thought His cause was 
dead. And it was, unless He arose from the dead. You 
ean explain the world’s history only by believing that 
Christ who was dead came out of the grave alive. It is 
positively ineredible that a civilization like ours should 
advanee steadily for nineteen hundred years and be 
founded on a lie. You could no more support Christian 
civilization without a basis of reality than you could 
support the sky-serapers of New York City towering fifty 
and sixty stories in height without a foundation under 
them. It is no more certain that Julius Cesar lived 
than that Jesus Christ came out of the grave alive after 
He had been dead three days. It is no more certain 
that Oliver Cromwell lived and fought for England’s 
liberty; or that Napoleon Bonaparte lived and fought 
against the liberty of the world; it is no more certain 


THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 129 


that Abraham Lincoln lived and wrought for the liberty 
of the black slaves, than that Jesus Christ lived among 
men nineteen hundred years ago, that He died on a 
cross, that His dead body was put in the grave, that 
Roman soldiers were set to watch it, and that on the 
third day He came out of the grave and showed Him- 
self alive by many infallible proofs. No fact in history 
is better established than that. You can get rid of it 
only by throwing the laws of evidence to the winds. 
Men are able to disbelieve the resurrection of Christ only 
by saying that no amount of evidence could prove it. 
Such a man it is useless to argue with. He has given up 
thinking, and on that subject he is not sane. 

There is only one more question that could possibly 
arise, and that is as to whether the man who is alive is 
the same man who died on the eross. Could there pos- 
sibly be some mistake as to that? But that is simply a 
matter of proving one’s personal identity. And that is 
not an intricate or difficult matter. We might doubt 
whether a man is the one he claims to be if he had been 
out of sight for years. But there hardly could be any 
mistake when he was away for three days only and then 
comes back, and the proof is complete when he is recog- 
nized not by one person only but by a dozen, a score, 
and even several hundred. It surely was a simple mat- 
ter for the apostles who had lived with Jesus for three 
years to recognize Him aiter an absence of three days 
only, and that when He had on Him marks that proved 
His identity with the one who had hung on the cross. 
And yet there are men who eall themselves Christians, 
and some of whom stand in Christian pulpits, who would 
have us believe that identification is so difficult a mat- 
ter that no amount of testimony from any number of 
sensible men is sufficient to prove the identity of the 


130 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


Christ who was risen with the Christ who was erucified. 
Men who argue in that fashion have lost their reason. 

Pardon me some personal reminiscences. It is a com- 
mon thing for me to meet people whom I have not seen 
for years. They come to church to hear me preach. IL 
meet them in places all over the country where I have 
appointments to speak. It has been exceedingly interest- 
ing to me to see how they identify me. I was speak- 
ing in Williamsport, Penna., some time ago. After the 
services were over an elderly lady came up to speak 
to me. She had been the soprano in the choir in the 
chureh in Philadelphia which I had attended as a boy. 
She had not seen me since I was ten years old, but she 
said she recognized me as soon as I came on the plat- 
form that night, and I was in no doubt at all as to 
her identity. Some time ago a woman came into my 
own prayer-meeting in New York. She had heard me 
relate my Christian experience in Beth Eden Church in 
Philadelphia when I was a boy fourteen years old. She 
had not seen me since that night. She came to the 
church not certain that I was the same person. But she 
says that she recognized me on sight, and she told me 
some of the things I said that night when as a boy I 
asked to be received into the church, and I ean testify 
that her memory was accurate. In another instance a 
woman came to my church whom I baptized in Philadel- 
phia thirty years ago. She had not seen me for twenty- 
seven years. She said that at first sight she was doubt- 
ful, but as soon as I began to speak her doubts vanished. 
She said that the voice was unmistakable. 

But in all these cases, you will say, the people were 
expecting to see me. That is true. And that might 
affect one’s judgment about the certainty of their iden- 
tification. But two other cases stand out in my experi- 


THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 131 


ence where there was no such expectation and yet the 
identification was complete. 

Some time ago I had occasion to go to an apartment 
house office on upper Broadway, New York City. I 
found a young man in the office and talked with him. 
I did not suppose I ever had met him before. I had 
no reason to give him my name in the inquiries I was 
making. At the conclusion of the conversation he said 
to me, ‘‘Isn’t your name Goodchild?’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ I re- 
plied. ‘‘Frank Goodchild?’’ he then asked. I said, 
‘*Yes.’’ He said, ‘‘I heard you preach in Philadelphia.’’ 
I said, ‘‘I left Philadelphia more than twenty-five years 
ago.’’ He said, ‘‘You buried my grandmother and my 
cousin, and I heard you preach twice in your own 
church.’’ He saw me four times when he was nothing 
but a boy, and after a lapse of twenty-five years he recog- 
nized me on sight. It is the simplest matter in the world, 
this matter of identifying people. If testimony as to 
one’s identity were of no value or even of doubtful 
value, we could have no courts of justice. For the first 
thing required of a witness is that he shall look on the 
prisoner and identify him. 

If we are not able to testify with accuracy as to one’s 
identity it would be an exceedingly difficult thing to 
transact business. Some time ago I preached one Sun- 
day in a church in Los Angeles, California. At the 
close of the day’s services, the treasurer handed me a 
check. The next morning I went to the bank on which 
the check was drawn to have it cashed. But when I 
presented it at the paying teller’s window he said, ‘‘Do 
you know any one in Los Angeles whom you could bring 
here to identify you?’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ I said, ‘‘I know a num- 
ber of business men in Los Angeles, but I would not 
wish to disturb any one of them to bring him here to 


132 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


procure the payment of this check. But I have ample 
means of identification with me. I have two thousand 
dollars’ worth of traveller’s checks drawn to my order; 
I have a presentation watch with my full name engraved 
on it; I have mail which I received this morning in the 
hotel on whose property your bank is located.’’ When 
he still looked doubtful I said, ‘‘With such means of 
identification as this I could get money from a bank in 
Hong Kong, or in almost any city in the world.’’ But 
he shook his head and said, ‘‘Those things don’t go 
here.’? You know Los Angeles boasts of being ninety- 
nine per cent. pure, and I have noticed that when people 
make such a loud boast of their own integrity they are 
usually very suspicious of other people. I paused a 
moment to think what to do next, and just then a man 
came up and put his face close to the teller’s window 
and said, ‘‘This man is Frank M. Goodchild.’’ I said, 
‘<™hat is correct, but who are you?’’ He said, ‘‘T heard 
you speak in Albany, N. Y.’’ I said, ‘‘I have not spoken 
in Albany for ten years.’’ He said, ‘‘ Yes, it was about 
ten years ago. I was then pastor of a Baptist church 
in Albany. I am now private secretary to the president 
of this bank.’’ That man had not seen me for ten 
years. He saw me then only as I stood on a platform 
speaking. That was the only time he ever saw me. And 
yet his identification of me was so complete and satis- 
factory that that suspicious bank teller immediately 
handed me out the hundred dollars my check ealled for. 
Why then should any one challenge the identification of 
the Master by men from whom He had been separated 
only three days? Identification is not so intricate and 
difficult a matter as some men would have us believe. 
But, you say, you are accepting the testimony of the 
writers of the New Testament. Certainly. Why not? 


THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 133 


With the exception of a single line in Tacitus the New 
Testament is the only written proof of the first century 
that Jesus Christ ever lived. But the New Testament 
is pretty good proof, let me tell you. The First Epistle 
to the Thessalonians was written in the year A. pD. 53. 
The scholarship of the world is agreed on this. But 
that is only a little more than twenty years after the 
death of Christ. And in no book of the New Testa- 
ment is the resurrection more clearly and positively an- 
nounced than in this little epistle. T'wenty years after 
the resurrection this little book speaks of the resurrec- 
tion not as though it was a new announcement, but as 
a fact accepted by all the churches and that underlay 
their faith. That brings us pretty close to the resurrec- 
tion. It is a little over sixty years since Abraham Lin- 
eoln was shot. There are many people in every congre- 
gation of Christian people who remember that fateful 
event. But this epistle that tells so clearly about the 
resurrection of Christ was in existence in one-third of 
that number of years after the resurrection took place. 
Nobody doubts that Socrates lived. But the oldest 
manuscripts that speak of Socrates, the writings of Plato, 
are not earlier than the sixth century of our era, and 
that is a thousand years after Plato’s death. And yet 
on the testimony of so recent a manuscript as that it 
is no strain on our faith to believe that Socrates lived. 
The oldest manuscript of Cesar’s commentaries that we 
have dates about seven hundred years after Cesar’s 
death. But we have manuscripts of the New Testament 
dating from the early part of the fourth century, that 
is within three hundred years after the death of Christ. 
So that we may confidently say that the resurrection of 
Christ is better attested than the poisoning of Socrates 
or the assassination of Julius Cesar, and so far as I 


134 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


know nobody doubts those events. There is absolutely 
no reason why any one should doubt the resurrection 
of Jesus Christ. It is as well attested as any fact in 
human history. And the refusal of some to acknowledge 
it, does not in the least change the well assured fact. 

This ought to make us very happy. We may con- 
fidently say that Christ is risen. If He is risen, all His 
claims are verified. If He is risen we shall be so ex- 
ultant over it that we shall be eager to tell the good 
news to all the world. If He arose, we shall rise. If 
He arose, our dear ones who have gone from us are not 
dead but gone before and they are living in happiness 
with the Saviour. If He is risen He will take care of us 
to the end as He promised. If He is risen His cause 
cannot fail in the world, and ultimate and complete vic- 
tory is certain. If H@ is risen He will come back again 
as He said He would, and every eye shall see Him, and 
His people will be with Him in His triumph and glory. 
Thank God He is risen! 


IX 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN A FUTURE LIFE? 


“ Because I live, ye shall live also.’—JoHN 14:19. 


\ N y HEN Lazarus was raised from the dead the 
chief thought of his sisters, perhaps their only 
thought, was one of joy that they had him 
back again. There is no slightest hint in the story as it 
is told us in the New Testament that either Mary or 
Martha or the apostles ever argued from Lazarus’s resur- 
rection from the dead that we too should rise. I sup- 
pose one could make such an argument from the resur- 
rection of anybody from the dead. If I had a friend 
who died; and I saw him die, so that I was sure of it; 
and I saw him buried so that I was sure of that; and 
he came back to me and took me by the hand, so that 
I was sure he was alive again; and I heard his voice just 
as it was before he died, that would mean tremendous 
things tome. My joy at having him back would be the 
least part of my emotions. My mind would at once set 
itself to work on the great fact that I had seen with 
my own eyes a man who was dead but was not dead now 
but as much alive as ever, and I would build on that 
one fact a whole philosophy of life; I would argue that 
death does not amount to anything; I should have no 
fear of death any more; I should know that all that I 
had imagined about the horrors of death and the fear 
I had had of being blotted out that makes us shrink from 
the end of existence here, were nothing but foolish 
fancies like the stories of bogies that nurses invent to 
frighten children with. 
135 


136 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


A man whose early life was spent in California told 
me of a child who lived in the southwestern part of our 
eountry where there are many great gulches like the 
Canyon of the Colorado. This child had a nurse who 
was very fearful lest some time when her eyes were off 
her, the child would wander away, and going too near 
the edge of the canyon, would fall over and be lost. 
So she told the child that she must keep away from the 
eanyon; that the canyon was full of hobgoblins, and if 
she went near the edge of it they would catch her and 
eat her up. The child often looked at the canyon, but 
always with feelings of terror. At last an older brother 
who had been away at college came home. He had his 
little sister out walking with him one day. As they came 
near the edge of the great ravine he suggested that they 
go down the path into it. The child drew back in terror. 
She warned her brother of the danger of it. She told 
him about the hobgoblins, and the cruelties they would 
inflict on any one who came into their power, and she 
begged him not to go. Her brother laughed at her fears, 
but she was obdurate. Then pointing into the ravine he 
said to her, ‘‘Do you see that little hill on the other 
side of the gulley? ’? She said she did. Then he said, 
“‘Tf I go down there and stand on that hill, and come 
back safe and sound, will you go down with me?’’ That 
was a fair test and the child said ‘‘ Yes.’’ Down into the 
ravine the brother went. He was out of sight for a 
moment, and the little girl’s heart was in her mouth. 
Then as she watched, he appeared again, and mounted 
the hill, and as he stood there he gaily waved his hand- 
kerchief, and she waved her hand in return. Then he 
started back; was out of sight again for a brief while, 
and then he reappeared at the top of the path down 
which he had gone. When she found there was no 


A FUTURE LIFE 137 


sign of harm on him she put her hand in his and went 
down without fear. So precisely, if I should see some 
one who was dead, come back, safe and sound, and as 
much alive as ever, I should feel that my fear of death 
had no more foundation than that child’s fear of hob- 
goblins. 

That is the way our Lord’s disciples felt about His 
resurrection from the dead. He told them that if they 
put their trust in Him, they would have nothing to fear. 
Death could not hold them. Death could not touch 
them. It could no more hurt them than it could hurt 
Him. Because He lived, they would live too. Life is as 
real on the other side of the gulley that lies between 
us and the other world as it is here, and it is a great 
deal fuller, and richer, and in every way better than it 
is here. 

I am told that most people to-day feel no interest in 
a future life, and it is evident that many Christian 
people are losing their hold on it. Preachers have no 
vivid sense of the future, and they are even advising 
their people to adopt Henry D. Thoreau’s maxim and 
live for one world at a time, though the New Testament 
Christians lived under the influence of the powers of 
the world to come and the apostles boasted that their 
citizenship was not of this world but was in heaven. 

I ean understand how those who have never lost a 
relative or friend might have little interest in another 
life. All their interests are here, and their thought and 
affections are here. But those who have had dear ones 
taken away by death, what sort of hearts and minds must 
they have if they do not try to see beyond the horizon 
of the short life we have here? What kind of apprecia- 
tion of his dear ones can a man have who believes that 
they die like the beasts that perish? JI can understand 


138 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


how some plain woman in New York or Boston, doing 
her humdrum tasks day by day, should feel no interest 
in China. She has no ties to bind her to that country. 
Nothing has happened to awaken her interest in it. She 
hardly knows its location on the map. She never has 
undertaken to pronounce its names. But by and by 
her son goes to China, and that very evening she bor- 
rows an atlas from her next door neighbour, and she 
looks over that land from end to end; she learns to say 
the names of its towns and provinees so that she speaks 
them as easily as she does the names of the streets near 
her own home, and in less than a week’s time the whole 
land of China is familiar and interesting to her. Even 
the Chinamen she passes on the street are full of in- 
terest to her now and she wishes she might stop them 
as they pass by and talk with them about that land in 
which she once felt no interest at all. That is a thor- 
oughly normal way of acting. And something is wrong 
with the hearts or minds of people who ean lose their 
dear ones by death and who feel no interest in what 
there is on the other side of death, or who can feel for 
a moment that their dear ones have gone into nothing- 
ness like a dog that dies. 

Indeed I do not see how just for one’s own sake a 
human being can live on from day to day with such a 
cheerless faith as that of a worldling, who has nothing 
to hope for beyond the grave. This is a frightfully 
monotonous and tiresome existence except as you have a 
hope of it issuing into something better and greater. 
Variety is the spice of life, we say. A dead sameness is 
killing. Most people know pretty well what will go on 
in their lives to-morrow, and the next day, and the next 
indefinitely. Sometimes the sameness of it gets on our 
nerves. And so it will continue. You will go on living 


A FUTURE LIFE 139 


very much the same sort of life until you die. You will 
get up about the same time in the morning, go along 
the same streets to business, do the same kind of 
work, take the same street-cars and trains home in the 
evening as you have done for years, spend the evening 
as you do seven days in the week, go to bed, get up again 
when the alarm clock rings, and begin the old routine 
over again, day in and day out, year in and year out, 
no romance, no change, for forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy 
years, and then a short sickness and a funeral, and a 
headstone. That is the way life goes, and it is a pretty 
gray sort of a thing if that is all. I imagine life is a 
bit drab to most people who are over fifty years of age, 
and there is only one thing that can redeem it from 
utter commonplaceness, and that is for a man to have 
an outlook into something beyond. It is tremendously 
true that where there is no vision people perish. 

It may seem a foolish notion but I have always thought 
I should not like to live in an inland town. I have 
always preferred a seaport where there are lines of travel 
reaching out to all parts of the world. I have liked to 
go about the streets with the consciousness that I was in 
easy touch with other peoples and other lands. I 
watched with sustained interest the arguments that the 
representatives of the nations carried on at the close of 
the great war. The newspapers described it as a squab- 
ble, and spoke of it as though it was nothing but greed 
for territory that animated every man. It is true that 
those representatives of the nations were as fierce as 
tigers as they contended with each other. But it was 
not simple greed of land that made them so. We who 
live in a land open to all the world, with scores and 
seores of seaports and great rivers running to the sea 
from far inland, have no idea how people feel who are 


140 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


surrounded by other and alien countries, how shut up, 
and cramped and smothered they are. The fight of 
these people was to get an outlet. Lands that were shut 
up wanted to get to the seaboard. Russia has been back- 
ward because other nations have kept her from the open 
sea. Give a nation that is shut up a single port and 
it will bring new life and hope to her people. She will 
get ships, her men will become sailors, her vessels will 
go freely to ports far and near carrying what she raises 
or manufactures, and bringing back the treasures of 
other lands. Her people will be transformed and en- 
larged by the outlet they have acquired. So if the 
soul is shut up by the boundaries of the little life we 
have here, we are poor creatures, indeed, and our lives 
are gray and cheerless. But if we have an outlook into 
another world beyond, so that we can send thoughts, and 
prayers and aspirations into it, and bring back inspira- 
tion, and comfort, and hope, then no matter how poor 
our circumstances or conditions of life are, life will be 
rich. 

Christianity gives us this outlet that is needed to make 
life larger and better. It says that life in this world is 
only a beginning and that there is another life. After 
the grave life is continued without a break or a jolt. So 
surely is life there a continuation of the life here, that 
we are assured that our bodies are to be revived. ‘‘ All 
that are in the graves shall hear his voice and come 
forth.’’? ‘‘The earth and the sea shall give up their 
dead.’’ In all ways we shall be identical persons with 
what we are here. Our friends will know us, and we 
shall know them, just as we recognize each other when 
we are separated only for a night. That is the assur- 
ance that Christianity gives. It is because you are 
Christians that you can say, ‘‘I believe in the resurrec- 


A FUTURE LIFE 141 


tion of the body and the life everlasting.’? When you 
cease to be able to say that you cease to be Christian, 
for that faith is fundamental to Christianity. 

Really since man’s life is in every way larger and 
better when he cherishes a hope of a life beyond the 
grave it is reasonable to believe that God meant him to 
cherish that hope, and means to satisfy it. If man dies 
like a beast or a butterfly, then it is reasonable for him 
to live like a beast or a butterfly for that which is perish- 
ing and superficial. But men do not approve that sort 
of a life. Nobody considers it an admirable program 
for life to say, ‘‘ Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we 
die.’? Men have ideals for which they ought to live, 
and they admit that there are certain principles to which 
they ought to be obedient. And it seems to me that our 
Maker has deceived us if He has so made us that we 
must live according to high and noble principles that 
belong to a life that is above what is known to the erea- 
tures that belong to this world alone, and intends at the 
end to treat us just as He treats these creatures that 
are of the earth, earthy. Why should a being who is 
mortal simply, be expected to live as though he were 
immortal? There may be men who ean find no evidence 
of design in nature, but thoughtful men never cease ex- 
pecting to find the processes of nature to be self-con- 
sistent and rational. That is the thought that was in 
John Fiske’s mind. He did not think about these things 
as you and I do, but he said in his lectures on The 
Destiny of Man, ‘‘T believe in the immortality of the 
soul, not in the sense in which I accept demonstrable 
truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the 
reasonableness of God’s work.’’ 

For those who like the word of science we may say 
that scientific men are more ready to admit that there 


142 "CAN WE BELIEVE? 


may be another life than ever they were before. That 
keen-eyed skeptic, John Stuart Mill, admitted that. He 
said in his Three Essays, ‘‘There is no evidence in 
science against the immortality of the soul but that 
negative evidence which consists in the absence of evi- 
dence in its favour.’’ That is a very different judgment 
indeed from that of men who have contended that 
science made a belief in immortality impossible and even 
ridiculous. Thomas Huxley said, ‘‘Science has not one 
shred of evidence that the soul does not live after death. 
When denial of it is made, it is sheer theory and as- 
sumption.’?’ America’s foremost evolutionary philoso- 
pher, John Fiske, who died all too soon, delivered a 
course of lectures on The Life Hverlasting, in which 
he argued earnestly for the immortality of the soul. 
Sir Oliver Lodge, who occupies the place that Huxley 
had in England for so many years, is a conspicuous 
advocate of the immortality of the soul. F. W. H. 
Myers, the President of the Society for Psychical Re- 
search, onee said that in a hundred years everybody 
would believe in the resurrection of Christ, and so in the 
reality of life beyond the grave. 

But our hearts are not satisfied with the best argu- 
ments that men can construct. We need the ‘‘surer 
word’’ about it that Plato so longed for. We need a 
revelation from heaven about it. And we haveit. Jesus 
Christ brought life and immortality to ight. He died 
and rose again, and He said that because He lives we 
shall live also. He spoke with utter frankness of the 
life beyond the grave, and said that if it were not so 
He would have told us. And the Church has believed 
His assurances. Gibbon says that Christianity con- 
quered Rome because its hope of immortality delivered 
its disciples from all fear of death. Macaulay says that 


A FUTURE LIFE 143 


the hope of immortality changed the face of Europe be- 
cause it shed a victorious tranquillity over those who 
saw the shadow of death closing about them. For more 
than nineteen hundred years the Christian Church has 
been sounding out this great declaration: ‘‘I believe in 
the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.’’ 
And so long as it believes that it will go on making con- 
quests. 

This hope of eternal life transforms for us our life 
here. We are right in saying that if we ‘‘have a hope’”’ 
in Jesus Christ our eternal life is already begun. Life 
here for Christian people is a vastly different thing 
from what it is for children of the world. It has a dif- 
ferent quality. It is a delightful thing to go about day 
by day with the conviction in your heart that you are 
going to live forever, and that the passage from this 
world to the next has nothing in it to fear. People 
sometimes look at me in blank amazement when I say 
that I expect to live forever and that I am going to have 
a much better time in the other world than I have here. 
But that is what I believe and I believe it confidently. 
I expect to have larger capacity there than here; things 
that drag on me here I shall be released from there; and 
things that make for peace and happiness will be mul- 
tiplied there. And the basis of all my confident expecta- 
tion is that Jesus Christ died and came back to life and 
showed that death can do us no harm, and He promised 
to prepare a place for us in the other world, and I feel 
sure that with all the power He has and with such love 
as He has for His people He will not give us anything 
mean. Sometimes as I sit and think of it I almost have 
a glimpse of the resplendent life into which death will 
usher us by and by. I have something of the curiosity 
that a child has on Christmas eve as to what wonderful 


144 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


things it will have on the morrow. No one can con- 
ceive of what riches we shall enter into on that eternal 
morning. It hath not entered into the heart of man what 
God hath prepared for them that love Him. But you 
may be sure that for us who are heirs of Christ, that 
will be the most resplendent day of our existence, when 
we pass through the gates of death and enter into our 
inheritance. It will be joy unbounded, peace fathom- 
less, life full of glory. 

It has been God’s habit from time to time to give His 
people such glimpses into that world of light as would 
encourage them to be faithful and hopeful in this life. 
Ezekiel had that blessed vision when he sat in exile by 
the River Chebar in Babylon. John had it when he was 
imprisoned for the Gospel’s sake in the Isle of Patmos. 
Bunyan had it in Bedford Jail when he conducted his 
pilgrims along the way to the Celestial city, and saw the 
gates open to receive them and under the spell of its 
glory he said, ‘‘I wished myself among them.’’ What a 
dreary world this would be if that heavenly door never 
had been opened so that its light might stream down 
into the darkness of this world! 

I sat by the side of a young man in the West not long 
ago when I was coming from Denver to New York. He 
was a stranger to me, but I spoke to him about the 
eternal life. He said very positively, ‘‘I do not believe 
in such things. I never go to church.’’ Then he paused 
a moment and said reflectively, ‘‘But I tell you I would 
not live in a place where there was no church.’’ Of 
eourse he would not. Nobody who thinks would do so. 
What would a community be without the holy sugges- 
tions the church makes and the comforting assurances it 
gives? Men could not really live without the light of 
the Gospel. Children could not be light hearted; the 


A FUTURE LIFE 145 


songs of the birds would lose their sweetness; the beauty 
would fade from the grass that covers the hillsides; the 
daisies that dance in summer meadows would lose their 
power to exhilarate us; the hearts of men would be deso- 
late and human life would be hopeless, without that 
vision through the door into heaven which Jesus Christ 
opened for us by His resurrection from the dead. Bless 
God we have that vision, the vision of a world beyond 
this, the assurance of eternal life through Jesus Christ 
our Lord. My own hope of it is bright and clear. Is 
yours? We have Christ’s own word for it. Could we 
have better assurance? 


xX 
CAN WE BELIEVE IN FUTURE PUNISHMENT? 


“Who will render to every man according to his deeds.”— 
ROMANS 2:6. 
fHLAT the character of that life is that comes 
after death, and whether anything that we 
ean do affects its character, are questions of 
prime importance. They have been fascinating subjects 
of thought to the best men of every age. Infidels and 
agnostics have found them no less fascinating than 
Christian believers. And it is not simple curiosity that 
prompts men to think on these things. They are of 
tremendous practical importance. If there is another 
life, it surely is affected by this life, and however men 
may declaim against what they call other-worldliness; 
however they may suggest that we should live for one 
world at a time; yet they cannot deny that it is a natural 
instinet to order our lives in this world according to 
what we believe is to follow it. The penalties that we 
believe will follow wrong-doing, and the rewards that 
we believe will be given to the righteous are determin- 
ing factors in our lives here. No other thought so pro- 
foundly affects the life of every man in the world as 
this. 

When we think of the hereafter we are more concerned 
about the penalties than the rewards. Somehow the lost 
claim more of our attention than the saved. We are 
interested in those who stand at the right hand of the 
throne, but we are concerned for those who stand at the 
left. No matter where the good man is we know it is 

146 





HUTURE PUNISHMENT 147 


well with him, and there is no need of anxiety on his 
behalf. But there is so much of mystery and dreadful- 
ness shrouding the future of the bad man that our 
hearts are moved for him. Painful as it is to reflect 
on his lot, our thoughts will revert to it, and against our 
wills we ask questions about it. 

No other part of Christian teaching has been so mis- 
understood and so grossly misrepresented as its teach- 
ings about future punishment. ‘T'o some people that is 
about all the churches stand for. It is by no means an 
uncommon thing for a man to excuse himself from going 
to church by saying that he does not care to hear a man 
talk about hell. Such a man evidently thinks that a 
preacher has but a single theme and that an unwelcome 
one. And he is right in so far as he means that the 
thought of penalty and reward in some way underlies 
all that the preacher says. But that thought underlies 
all moral teaching wherever you find it. That thought 
underlies all the teaching of Jesus Christ. There were 
always the two sides to His teaching made unmistakably 
clear to His auditors, that acceptance of Him meant 
salvation, and rejection of Him meant destruction. And 
yet, if a man say that the pulpit of to-day has no 
message but a threatening of hell to wrong-doers, I am 
at a loss to know what church he has attended. 

There was a time probably when the preaching of 
future punishment was over-emphasized. Jonathan Ed- 
wards filled his hearers with terror. He pictured God 
holding the sinner over the flames of hell as one might 
hold a noxious worm over a fire debating whether or not 
to drop it in. Or he represented God as sweeping 
sinners into perdition as a woman might sweep the car- 
easses of flies into the fire. Thought of future punish- 
ment was pushed by Edwards to the very verge of 


148 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


hysteria. So it was with the Church in the medieval 
period. The Church was to the people of the middle ages 
simply a place in which to take refuge from the wrath 
to come, and the teaching of coming retribution had 
then a place altogether out of right proportion to other 
truths. But that charge hardly can be made against the 
pulpit of to-day. Indeed we probably have shrunk too 
much from speaking of the penalty of sin. Mr. Glad- 
stone said shortly before his death that our great peril 
is that we think there is nothing in God to fear. The 
bad man ought to be afraid of God. But the pulpit 
of to-day does not often remind him of it. We say with 
a loud voice that it will be well with the righteous, but 
our voice sinks to a whisper when we say that it will be 
ill with the wicked. We are in danger of becoming 
soft and nerveless, and of shutting our eyes to plain 
facts simply because they are stern and unpleasant. 
We ought surely in so serious a matter to be men enough 
to face the facts as they are, and we ought to be truth- 
ful enough to state all the facts as we find them. No 
one but a demon could find any delight in contemplat- 
ing the dreadful punishment of the wicked. But a man 
is a traitor to his duty and an enemy to mankind, if 
he lets his sensibilities silence his lips when God bids 
him lift up his voice in warning. 

There is no need at all to be ashamed of teaching in 
unmistakable terms that there is to be punishment for 
sin in the future. There is abundant reason to be 
ashamed of the pulpit that gives no such message. The 
pulpit that does not threaten punishment for sin is 
false to Bible teaching, and just as false to facts of life 
which any one can observe. There is such a thing as a 
sense of justice in a man’s bosom. We are not satisfied 
when iniquity is winked at. We feel that the wrong- 


FUTURE PUNISHMENT 149 


doer ought to smart for his wickedness. If some mis- 
ereant wantonly injures your child the whole community 
feels that he ought to suffer for his misdeeds. It is a 
mawkish sentimentality that says that only those meas- 
ures should be applied to him which would bring him 
to a better state of mind. One of the best signs of the 
coming of a better state of mind is for the culprit to feel 
that he ought to be punished. It is a thoroughly normal 
thing for people to feel that the wrong-doer should feel 
the sting of punishment for his misdeeds. That is not a 
spirit of vengefulness. It is a sense of justice demand- 
ing proper satisfaction. Any normal conscience ap- 
proves that demand, even if we ourselves are the culprit. 

Dr. Augustus H. Strong has told us of a remarkable 
scene in the court room at Plattsburg, N. Y. A trial 
for murder was near its close. The man on trial was a 
life convict who had struck down a fellow convict with 
an ax. After being out two hours the jury returned to 
ask the judge to explain to them the difference between 
murder in the first degree and murder in the second de- 
gree. The prisoner at once arose and said, ‘‘This was 
not murder in the second degree. It was a deliberate, 
premeditated murder. I know that I have done wrong; 
that I ought to confess the truth; and that I ought to 
be hanged.’’ That man had a normal conscience. The 
jury brought in a verdict in accordance with what the 
prisoner said. 

Some who are among us still will remember the case 
of Earl, the wife murderer. He thanked the jury that 
convicted him; declared the verdict just; begged that 
no one interfere with the course of justice; and said that 
the greatest blessing that could be conferred upon him 
would be to let him suffer the proper penalty for his 
crime, 


150 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


Not very long ago the newspapers of Philadelphia told 
of a woman who had slain her betrayer. She was sen- 
tenced to a short term in prison. But when the sentence 
was pronounced she fell on her knees and begged the 
judge to send her to prison for life or else to hang her. 
Her conscience was thirsty for adequate punishment. 
And while judge and jury and the attorneys on both 
sides wept, she had to be fairly dragged from the court 
room. This is not fiction. It is reality. There is a 
sense of justice in every right-hearted man’s bosom that 
demands that iniquity should be punished. That is not 
simply the teaching of the Bible. It is written just as 
plainly on the tablets of man’s heart as it is on the 
pages of the sacred Book. The Christian preacher who 
ignores this truth throws away his power, and plays false 
to his God, to his own soul, and to his fellow men. I 
know very well how the mechanistic philosophies taught 
in our schools to-day deny the reality of conscience and 
seek to explain it away. But woe to human society when 
conscience is no more believed in! 

Perhaps no part of Christian teaching has received 
such reinforcement at the hands of science as this doc- 
trine of penalty. The teachings of science are terrify- 
ing to the man who thinks. Science says every deed 
has its inevitable sequel. The effect is sure to follow the 
cause. When we sin suffering is sure to follow. We 
hardly need a Bible to teach us that in these days. 
Every text-book on physiology teaches us that. The law 
is written plainly on nerve and brain. The drunkard 
does eat the fruit of his own devices. The libidinous 
man must look forward to a blighted old age. The never- 
resting man pays the penalty in shattered nerves. Na- 
ture is inexorable. She relentlessly forecloses the mort- 
gage that our misdeeds have put upon us. Nature 


FUTURE PUNISHMENT 151 


thunders out even more loudly than the Bible does,— 
‘*Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’’ 
Infidel philosophers proclaim as plainly as any evan- 
gelical preacher can that ‘‘ He who sows to the flesh shall 
of the flesh reap corruption.’’ Some time ago when I 
preached a sermon on ‘‘The Wrath to Come,’’ a man in 
the congregation, a visitor from New England, came to 
me as I descended from the pulpit and complimented 
me on my courage in preaching such a doctrine in these 
days. I replied that it took very little courage, indeed, 
to declare what is written so plainly in the Bible, and 
it took less courage still when that truth is declared not 
only by the Bible but with equal plainness by science 
and common sense. There is nothing in the world more 
certain than this; there is nothing that is so easily 
demonstrated as this, that sin brings its just penalty. 
‘‘Though hand go in hand, the wicked shall not go un- 
punished.”’ 

To get the clearest teaching there is on the subject of 
future punishment we must go to the words of Jesus 
Christ. I do not set aside the Old Testament because 
I do not regard it as authoritative for it is to me of 
equal authority with the New Testament. I am not silent 
about it because it has nothing to say about the punish- 
ment of the wicked in the world to come. It has much 
to say about it. Our friend and neighbour, Dr. Charles 
EK. Jefferson, has said that ‘‘there is not a single picture 
in the Old Testament of anything that is going to hap- 
pen on the other side of death.’’ <A single instance only 
is needed to refute that. Here it is. Daniel gives it 
to us. He says, ‘‘Many of them that sleep in the dust 
of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and 
some to everlasting shame and contempt.’’ What a pic- 
ture that is, how vivid, how terrifying! There are other 


152 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


passages in the Old Testament that to me are equally 
explicit. But we do not need them. There is nothing 
sald by prophet or preacher or psalmist in the Old Testa- 
ment or by apostles in the New Testament, that is not 
said with even greater plainness and more terrible force 
by the Saviour. The most terrible things that ever were 
uttered in this world about the future punishment of the 
impenitent were said by Him who wept over the sinful 
city, and pitied the sinful woman, and portrayed the 
eareer of a sinful son in such tender words that the heart 
of the whole world has been moved by the recital. He 
never seems to have looked upon a sinner without com- 
passion filling His breast, and He so yearned for the 
sinner’s salvation that He took on Himself the burden of 
the sinner’s guilt. And yet it was He who depicted the 
impenitent sinner’s future in terms that shock our every 
sensibility. He says that the last estate of the sinner is 
like the valley of Hinnom, with its foul smoke ever rising, 
and its festering corruption ever seething. He besought 
men with tears in His eyes to undergo any mutilation 
of the body rather than risk the loss of the soul. He 
described with unspeakable sorrow how some by delib- 
erate choice have so degraded their natures that they 
turn from the throne of judgment and go into fire that 
was prepared not for them, but for the devil and his 
angels. Think of the phrases which the Master uses to 
describe the sinner’s woe,—the gnawing of an undying 
worm,—the scorching of an unquenchable fire,—weep- 
ing, the universal sign of grief,—gnashing of teeth, the 
sign of extreme disappointment and rage,—the outer 
darkness, with all the unknown horrors which it sug- 
gests. He speaks of the sinner being bound, of his suf- 
fering torments, of destruction and perishing. No 
language can possibly go beyond this. And if it be said 


FUTURE PUNISHMENT 153 


that all these phrases are but figures of speech, I should 
say that that of course is true. But figures of speech 
mean something. Indeed figures of speech are used 
here, I suspect, because the reality is so dreadful that 
plain speech can give no conception of the thing to be 
described. 

I remember when I was a small boy attending a Sun- 
day morning service in the lower part of Philadelphia in 
a little mission school. It was a very snowy, bitterly 
cold morning. There were but four of us present. These 
were the old sexton, one other man who was a member of 
the chureh, my father, and myself a boy of less than 
twelve years. We gathered about the heater that held a 
glowing fire. Somehow, perhaps because of the fire that 
glowed in the stove, the conversation turned to the future 
punishment of the wicked. The old question that once 
so troubled people was asked as to whether hell is literal 
fire. This man of whom I have spoken sat there looking 
into the stove. He had a grave thoughtful face. He. was 
very wise in the things of the kingdom. He said quietly: 
“*Not real fire, no, no. But it is something more dread- 
ful still. For the substance is always weightier than 
the shadow it casts. The book I hold in my hand weighs 
more than the shadow it casts on the floor. Then if 
fire is the shadow of the punishment to come, what must 
the reality be!’’? Then he lapsed into silence as he con- 
tinued gazing into the fire. I do not suppose that that 
man thought much of the impression he was making on 
the mind of the boy who sat listening to the conversa- 
tion that day. But what he said gave me such a sense 
of the dreadfulness of sin and of the punishment it 
brings as has never left me since. 

Well then, the first thing that is evident from the 
Saviour’s teaching is that the punishment of sin is cer- 


154 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


tain. There is no hesitation in the announcement. It is 
no guess. It is declared with authority. There are two 
gates, one narrow, the other wide; we can choose for our- 
selves which to enter. There are two roads, represent- 
ing two modes of life; we can follow which of the two 
we please. There are two destinies toward one or the 
other of which we all are tending, one is life and the 
other destruction. The gate we enter, and the road we 
follow determine which of these two destinies is ours. 
Every man is master of his own ultimate fate. 

Another thing which Christ makes clear is that the 
punishment of sin will be just. The judge of all the 
earth will do right. On earth the scales of justice are 
not always held with even hand. Men make mistakes. 
They are not impartial. They cannot see all the circum- 
stanees. Sometimes they are bribed to decide against 
the innocent and to let the guilty escape. But at the 
judgment bar of God justice will be perfectly adminis- 
tered. Every man will receive exactly what he deserves. 
Allowances will be made for ignorance. The servant 
who did not know his Lord’s will is to be beaten with 
few stripes; the one who knew and was deliberately dis- 
obedient will have many stripes. ‘‘To whomsoever much 
is given, from him much will be required.’’ Sometimes 
we have thought that a man who is lost is lost, and that is 
all there is to it. All those not saved, we have thought, 
are huddled together in one place in one condition of 
misery. But the Saviour says that penalties are graded. 
All are not alike in punishment, and all are not alike in 
reward. There is no such thing as favouritism in the 
final awards. Nothing is the result of whim or impulse. 
Punishment is in no sense arbitrary. It is not something 
that God puts upon the sinner. It is something that the 
sinner brings upon himself. Really it is not so much a 


FUTURE PUNISHMENT 155 


penalty as a consequence. The process that goes on in 
the garden when a man sows his seed and by and by 
gathers the appropriate harvest is not more natural than 
the punishment that will come to each sinner. We get 
what our character entitles us to. We reap what we have 
sown. The character we make in this world we carry 
into the other world. 

Some have said that death changes us. It was once 
believed by a large body of people that death so trans- 
forms a man that no matter what a man has been in 
this world as soon as he dies he goes as straight to heaven 
as an arrow shot from a bow. But the mere fact of 
dying makes no change in one’s character. The same 
laws of character prevail on the other side of the river 
of death as prevail here, just as the same laws of gravita- 
tion prevail on both sides of the East River. It is 
possible, I believe, that in the last hour a soul may be 
so transformed by a sight of Christ that he is changed 
from a sinner into a saint. That is rare, but it is pos- 
sible. But it is not the experience of death that makes 
the change. It is a sight of Christ that does it. The 
same power that converts a man in full vigour of life 
may change him when his life is ebbing away. But 
ordinarily character goes on with increasing momentum 
toward its chosen place. Hell is not so much a place 
into which the soul is plunged as a condition that the 
soul has made for itself. The old coloured woman was 
entirely right when on being told that there would not 
be brimstone enough to burn all the sinners, she said, 
** Ah, honey, you takes your brimstone with you.’’ 

There are some who contend that sin is sufficiently 
punished in this world. But no one who knows very 
much of this life could entertain any such notion. 
Some sins do come to their fruitage quickly, it is true. 


156 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


But others are very slow in reaching maturity. Drunk- 
enness and lust hurry men to disaster, though it must 
be admitted that even they do not bring upon the men 
who indulge in them as poignant suffering as upon the 
innocent people who are their victims. And there are 
many forms of sin like greed and eruelty, and vanity, 
and frivolity, that do not react at once in sorrow upon 
the soul that indulges them. They need a long time to 
reach their end. Some seed sprouts and reaches full 
development in a plant and bears seed in a single sea- 
son. Other seeds take a man’s lifetime to mature. So 
it is with sin. ‘‘Some men’s sins go before them unto 
judgment, others follow after.’’ 

I have read of a man in the Southwest who was a 
member of the legislature. He had always been re- 
spected. He was taken sick. When he knew that he was 
going to die he sent for a lawyer. ‘Then on his death 
bed he made a confession. Thirty years before he had 
been the cashier in a certain bank. He stole a small sum 
of money. He speculated with it. He was successful. 
But before he could replace the amount of money he had 
taken he was suspected. One night he found the presi- 
dent of the bank going over his books. He killed the 
man. then and there. Going out into the street he met 
a young man, not much more than a boy, who was em- 
ployed at the bank to sweep out the place and to do 
necessary errands. He gave the young man his keys 
and sent him to the bank to get some article for him. 
A moment later he met a friend of his and said to him, 
**T am afraid there is something wrong at the bank.’’ 
They entered the building together. They found this 
boy leaning over his prostrate employer. They threw 
themselves upon him. In the struggle the boy’s gar- 
ments were stained with blood. Everything was against 


FUTURE PUNISHMENT 157 


the lad. He was tried for murder and convicted. He 
was hanged. His mother died from the shock. His 
father died in grief. But this guilty man lived on and 
prospered. He showed no sign of penitence. He made 
money. He became the president of the bank. He was 
elected to the legislature. He was honoured and re- 
spected. He suffered no check to his ambition until the 
disease fastened on him that took him off. Did his death 
wipe out his guilt, do you think? Did the mere passage 
through the dark valley that we all must pass through 
set right the iniquity against that innocent boy? Did 
the mere experience of dying usher him happy into the 
presence of the employer whom he had murdered? In 
the face of such incidents as that, which are nut so in- 
frequent as we think, is there any one who ean claim 
that the punishment of sin is exhausted in this life? _ 

In this world Dives rolls in luxury; Lazarus sick and 
sore begs at the gate. Luxurious neglect on one side, 
and want on the other continue to the very moment of 
death. Is there to be no righting of such conditions in 
the other world? Nero wore purple, drank wine cooled 
with snow, slept and caroused in a palace. Paul ate 
erusts, wore poor garments, slept and languished in a 
dungeon. So far as suffering in this life is concerned 
Paul seems to have had a monopoly of it. Nero suf- 
fered little or none. Is Nero to share in the other world 
the same bliss that Paul has because sin is sufficiently 
punished in this world? What folly such a notion is, 
to be sure! Can such different characters as George 
Washington and Benedict Arnold, Abraham Lincoln and 
John Wilkes Booth walk arm in arm through eternity? 
Oh no! if, as the Saviour declares, character decides 
where a man shall go in the future world, then there 
must be a great gulf fixed between the evil and the good, 


158 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


the godly and the wicked, the blood-washed penitent and 
the stubborn impenitent. Each man goes to his own 
place. The tares and the wheat grow together here, but 
there they are separated. All sorts of fish are taken up 
in one net, but the good are saved and the bad are 
thrown away. Characters are as far apart as heaven > 
and hell. The destinies to which they go must be as 
widely separated. 

We are sure to ask ourselves as we think on this sub- 
ject, how great a proportion of people are to be saved, 
and how many lost. We have no means of knowing. 
A man in Christ’s congregation once asked Him, ‘‘ Are 
there few that be saved? ’’ Christ answered, ‘‘Strive to 
enter in at the strait gate; for many, I say unto you, 
will strive to enter in and shall not be able.”? He meant 
to say that those who ask such a question as that are 
busying themselves with things that do not concern 
them. Their proper business is to struggle for their own 
salvation. Many things which we should like to know 
we are not told. Nothing is said about the good men in 
other lands who had little opportunity to know the full 
truth about Jesus Christ, such as Mareus Aurelius. We 
are not told just how the great Judge will deal with 
those who die in distant lands before they have had any 
chance to hear of the Saviour. Christ is extremely prac- 
tical. He discourages speculation. He bids us look well 
to ourselves, and not to indulge our curiosity about other 
people. 

And then there is that other great question about how 
long the penalty will last. A big volume might be writ- 
ten about that. Good men have differed about it. Some 
have felt encouraged to hope that by and by all would 
be restored to the Father’s house. Theodore Parker be- 
lieved that the time would come when the last prodigal 


FUTURE PUNISHMENT 159 


would return and be welcomed home. That, however, is 
mere speculation. I should not like to encourage any 
one to build his hope of everlasting life on a human 
guess. Some have said that by and by the soul would 
utterly die; that when the penalty has been fully paid 
the spirit would become extinct. That is another guess. 
The Saviour gives us no way to answer such a question. 
Unless we give an unwarranted twist to the words of 
the Lord Jesus we are compelled to say that the im- 
penitent sinner is left there in the outer darkness. 
There is no end to the penalty that we ean discern. It 
may wring our hearts to say it, but we may not be 
wise above what is written. This much is certain, that 
if there is any way to save those who are in perdition, 
God will save them. He takes no pleasure in the death 
of the wicked. He would that all should repent and be 
saved. But He cannot save a man who refuses to be 
saved, and it may be that the soul that can resist all 
the pleadings of the Saviour in this world so hardens 
itself that there is no possible recovery for it. At any 
rate no one can resist the conviction that the New Testa- 
ment teaches that our state is fixed when we pass out 
of this world. No one can pass either way. The tares 
are burned, and we have no word about their being 
gathered together again and transformed into wheat. 
The worthless fish are thrown away, and we have no 
hint that they are gathered up again. The tree is cut 
down, and so it remains. What is right God will do, and 
we can safely leave all our unanswered questions to Him. 


XI 


CAN WE BELIEVE IN OUR LORD’S RETURN TO 
THE BARTH? 


“This same Jesus which is taken up from you into heaven, 
shail so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven,” 
—Acts I: II, 


HE greatest day in past history was the day 
when the Lord Jesus came into the world the 


first time. The greatest day in future history 
will be the day when the Lord Jesus will come into the 
world the second time. If we may judge of the im- 
portance of the day by the number of times it is men- 
tioned in the Bible, the day of our Lord’s return is the 
supremely important day of all history. In the 260 
chapters of the New Testament there are said to be 318 
clear allusions to our Lord’s return. If you divide the 
New Testament into blocks one verse in twenty-five has 
to do with the ‘‘second coming.’’ If you take the two 
epistles to the Thessalonians, the part of the New Testa- 
ment that deals especially with this great subject, you 
will find that one verse in every four refers directly to 
the Master’s return. 

Whenever the second coming of our Lord is spoken 
of, some people look askance, and display nervousness, 
and shrug their shoulders as though they disbelieve the 
whole thing, or if they believe it, feel that we know 
very little about it, and that it is of small importance 
anyhow. There are some who smile as though it were 
a bit of hare-brained folly. And a few are a bit spite- 

160 


OUR LORD’S RETURN TO THE EARTH 161 


ful about it. I have heard of a Christian minister who 
said in a sermon of his, ‘‘I hate that doctrine that Christ 
will come back to the earth.’’ When John the apostle 
thought of it he said: ‘‘Even so come, Lord Jesus.’’ 
But this man mentioned it only to say: ‘‘I hate it.’’ 
When Paul spoke of the crown that awaited him he 
said that Christ would give such a erown to all who 
love His appearing. Do you look forward with eager 
fondness to His appearing, or have you said as this un- 
worthy servant of Christ did: ‘‘Il hate the thought of 
it’’? Surely it ill becomes us to disparage what God 
emphasizes, and what God has taken pains to make 
known to us deserves our most earnest efforts to under- 
stand, and it will be for our spiritual profit to contem- 
plate. 

There is no possibility of mistaking the attitude of 
Christian people in New Testament times. All of them 
were looking forward with eager expectancy. No mat- 
ter whether they were in Jerusalem or in Rome; whether 
they were old disciples or young; had long experience 
or were new converts, they had this characteristic in 
common, they were earnestly looking for the return of 
their Lord. That is so marked that any one who should 
read the New Testament for the first time would get the 
impression that the very next event to happen would 
be the coming of Christ. It was the dominant thought 
in their minds always. No one can read the epistles 
even superficially without discerning this. Open to the 
Thessalonians and you find their conversion described as 
‘‘a turning to God from idols to serve the living and 
true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven.’’ Open 
to Corinthians and you find Paul telling them that they 
come behind in no gift ‘‘waiting for the revelation of 
our Lord Jesus Christ.’?’ Look in Galatians and you 


162 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


find Paul saying, ‘‘We through the Spirit wait for the 
hope of righteousness.’’ In Philippians we hear him 
saying, ‘‘Our conversation is in heaven whence also we 
look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.’’? In the 
Epistle to the Hebrews we have it said, ‘‘Christ also, 
having been offered for our sins, shall appear the second 
time, apart from sin to them that wait for him.’’ The 
personal purity and devotion of the believer were looked 
upon as a preparation for the coming of the Lord. Paul 
wrote to the Thessalonians, ‘‘The very God of peace 
sanctify you wholly, and I pray God your whole spirit, 
soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming 
of our Lord Jesus Christ.’? John puts the same thing 
in his peculiarly tender way. He says, ‘‘ And now, little 
children, abide in him, that when he shall appear, we 
may have confidence and not shame at his coming.’’ 
Paul exhorts Timothy to fidelity in view of that day. 
He says, ‘‘Keep this commandment without spot, unre- 
bukable, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.’’ 
Peter, in the same way, writes to his fellow-elders, 
‘“Feed the flock of God which is among you, and when - 
the chief shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown 
of glory that fadeth not away.’’ | 

A hope that was so cherished by the early Christians 
surely ought not to be banished from the life of the 
Church to-day. It is unfair to the world to do it, for 
the world has a right to the full proclamation of the 
Gospel. It is unfair to the Church, for Christian people 
have a right to the inspiration and comfort that come 
from this great hope. 

This is certainly true, that the thought of coming back 
to the earth was very dear to Jesus Christ. He often 
spoke of it. I think we may fairly say that the an- 
nounecement of His second coming brought about His 


OUR LORD’S RETURN TO THE EARTH 163 


condemnation. When the high priest asked Him whether 
He was the Christ, the Son of God, He replied, ‘‘ Yes. 
And hereafter ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on 
the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of 
heaven.’’? That was enough. The moment they heard 
that they accused Him of blasphemy and condemned 
Him to death, just because He said that He was the 
Christ and they would have the proof of it in His com- 
ing to earth again in glory. 

Some who have not liked the Bible’s teaching about 
our Lord’s return have tried to explain it away. Dr. 
William N. Clarke in his Outline of Theology, which 
was lauded by some as the sanest systematic theology 
that had appeared for a generation, said that the Lord 
had already come back to the world in the gift of the 
Holy Spirit. But may God pity us if all the gorgeous 
promises about our Lord’s return are already accom- 
plished and we did not know it! Any one who reads 
the last talk of the Lord Jesus with His apostles can 
see that He there promises two distinct things. He 
promises to send the Holy Spirit, and He promises that 
He Himself will return. He says, ‘‘I will return to you,’’ 
and then as a distinct promise He says, ‘‘I will send 
him (the Holy Spirit) unto you.’’?’ And what folly it 
is to say that the Lord fulfilled the promise of His second 
coming and the apostles should not have known it, and 
Peter and John and Paul should have gone on hoping for 
the Lord’s return and exhorting the people to watch for 
it when it was all over. To believe such a thing as that 
is of the same nature as Mrs. Eddy’s declaration that 
Christ returned in 1866 and nobody knew it bui her- 
self; or of the so-called Pastor Russell that Christ re- 
turned in 1874 and nobody but Pastor Russell knew it. 
What nonsense this is surely! | 


164 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


Some have said that the Lord’s coming means simply 
our death. The New Testament teaches no such thing 
as that. When a Christian dies it is spoken of as his 
going to the Lord, not as the Lord’s coming to him. 
There certainly is a difference between these things. 
Can you apply to death all the sweet words which the 
New Testament uses when it speaks of the coming of 
our Lord? The apostles never dreamed of confusing 
these things. Jesus said to Peter about John by the Sea 
of Galilee, ‘‘If I will that he tarry till I come what is 
that to thee? ’’ The apostles took Him to mean that 
John would not die. Paul says that those who have died 
before Christ’s return shall rise from the dead that they 
and the living disciples may meet and greet Him to- 
gether. And then too, death comes to one person at a 
time. But when the Lord returns it is to be for all the 
world at once. His coming is to be like the light, shin- 
ing from the east to the west. 

Peter clearly foretold the coming of these days of 
unbelief. He says, ‘‘There shall come in these last days 
seoffers walking after their own lusts and saying, 
‘Where is the promise of his coming? For since the 
fathers fell asleep all things continue as from the be- 
ginning of creation.’ ’’ That is the ery of unbelief which 
we hear to-day. 

Christ, however, did His best to keep alive our faith 
in His coming. He so arranged it that we cannot cele- 
brate His dying love without at the same time profess- 
ing our faith that He is coming back to us. The Lord’s 
Supper is a blessed ordinance, but it is a temporary one, 
and not intended to be perpetual. It will cease to be 
celebrated when our absent Lord is with us once more. 
The Saviour’s words are, ‘‘ As often as ye eat this bread 
and drink this cup ye do show forth his death till he 


OUR LORD’S RETURN TO THE EARTH 165 


come.’’ Dr. B. H. Carroll has well said that men who 
have ceased to believe in our Lord’s-personal, audible, 
and visible return ought to stop coming to the Lord’s 
Supper. 

Any one who takes his New Testament and studies it 
will find that we have it clearly promised there that the 
Lord Jesus is to return in person. ‘‘If I go and prepare 
a place for you, I will come again,’’ He says. The ‘‘I”’ 
that went is the ‘‘I’’ that will return. ‘‘This same 
Jesus which is taken into heaven shall so come in like 
manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.’’ That 
seems clear enough. He ascended personally, and He 
must descend in the same fashion if words have any 
meaning. Thank God we have so clear a word as this 
of the text, ‘‘This same Jesus shall come.’’ It is worth 
our while to give emphasis to these words by pausing 
and reflecting upon them. ‘‘This same Jesus.’’ We 
may have had a creeping fear that when we see Him 
He would be so transformed that we might not know 
Him, that He would have no marks about Him by which 
we could identify Him as the Saviour who died for us. 
I confess that I long to see the same Jesus who was here 
on earth. My eyes are hungry for a sight of the Jesus 
Christ who was born as a babe in Bethlehem, who 
obeyed as a child in Nazareth, who as a man trudged 
about Judea and Galilee, who was set at nought in 
Jerusalem, who suffered in Gethsemane, who died on 
Calvary’s cross, who lay in the tomb and came out of 
it alive, and ascended from Olivet. None of us wishes 
to see the glorified Christ alone, so transfigured that 
even His own original disciples would not know Him. 
We wish Him to be so identical with the Christ who was 
full of grace and truth on earth that as soon as our 
glance falls on Him we shall say with hearts full of 


166 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


emotion, and with every demand of our minds fully 
satisfied, ‘‘ That is He and none other! 


‘In His hands and feet are wound prints 
And His side.’ ”’ 


‘““This same Jesus shall return,’’ the angels said. 

And again the apostle John says that He will return 
visibly. ‘‘Every eye shall see him.’’ The word ‘‘see,”’ 
when it is used alone, sometimes means simply to per- 
eeive. The mind may see things that are invisible to 
the eye of the body. But I do not recall any place 
where the word ‘‘see’’ can have a figurative meaning 
where it is used with the word ‘‘eye.’’ And when we 
are told that ‘‘every eye shall see him,’’ it means that 
when He returns His presence shall be a visible pres- 
ence. We have a threefold assurance from His own 
lips. He told His disciples that they should see Him. 
He told His enemies that they should see Him. He told 
the high priest that he should see Him coming in the 
clouds of heaven. 

He is to return suddenly. Once when Newman Hall 
was preaching he said that he knew of no reason why 
Christ should not come before he finished his sermon. 
That is the sort of suddenness that Christ says will mark 
His return. He says, ‘‘As the days of Noah were, so 
shall the day of the Son of Man be; they were eating 
and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, and 
the flood came and took them all away.’’ ‘‘ Watch, 
therefore, for ye know not what hour your Lord shall 
come.’’ ‘‘As the lightning cometh out of the east and 
shineth even unto the west so shall also the coming of 
the Son of Man be.’?’ When He came at first, He came 
quietly and unobtrusively. No one knew of His com- 
ing except a few poor shepherds. All the rest of the 


OUR LORD’S RETURN TO THE EARTH 167 


world went on its careless way without a notion that 
its Redeemer had been born. Even at the time of His 
death He was not known outside of His own little 
country. The kingdom He founded has come into prom- 
inence as quietly and as slowly as an oak grows to 
maturity. But it will not be so in His second coming. 
That will be as conspicuous as His first advent was 
obscure. He will burst upon an unbelieving world with 
a brightness that makes the sun pale, and with a foot- 
fall ‘‘louder than a thousand thunders.’’ His first com- 
ing was like the breaking of day, gradual and silent. 
His second coming will be like the breaking of a thunder- 
storm, sudden and startling as the lightning flashes from 
the sky. 

There are people who tell us that the whole world 
must be converted before the Lord comes. When will 
that be? There are more heathen born every year than 
we have converts. We are not catching up very fast. 
We have not converted any whole town in America yet. 
Christ did not say that every soul must be converted 
before He comes back. That would not be coming sud- 
denly. On the contrary Christ says that the tares and 
the wheat shall grow together until He comes in judg- 
ment. And once He asked, ‘‘When the Son of Man 
cometh shall he find faith on the earth? ”’ 

He is to come gloriously, too. The first time He came 
He was poor, and in the eyes of men inglorious. He 
was the child of a young peasant woman. His first erib 
was a rude manger. His first robes were the swaddling 
clothes of poverty. Instead of the ringing of bells and 
the shouting of heralds by which royal births are an- 
nounced, there were the lowing of cattle and the bleat- 
ing of sheep whose stable the lowly parents had in- 
vaded. But it will not be so in His second coming. He 


168 CAN WE BELIEVE?’ 


will then be accompanied by ten thousand of His saints. 
He will be clothed with omnipotence. He will ride in 
chariots of glory. He will be heralded by trumpet blasts 
that will wake the dead. And in the very places where 
He once was derided and shamed and dishonoured and 
counted unworthy to live, His beauty will be seen, His 
worth shall be sung, and His name shall be exalted above 
every name. 

The time of His coming is not revealed to us. Robert 
McCheyne once asked his friends, ‘‘Do you think Christ 
will come before night?’’ One after another said, ‘‘I 
think not.’? Then he solemnly repeated the text, ‘‘In 
such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh.’’ 
Christ Himself said, ‘‘It is not for you to know the 
times and seasons.’’ When you see those words, ‘‘It is 
not for you to know’’ attached to anything by the Mas- 
ter Himself it is wise to let it alone. Who are we that 
we should undertake to ferret out what God has deter- 
mined to hide? And why should any one be so foolish 
as to insist on knowing what God does not wish to tell 
us? Just as soon as we begin to apply our small rules 
of arithmetic so as to fix the date of our Lord’s re- 
turn we lose our way. We are distinctly told that the 
time is not to be given to us, and the reason for it is 
just as clearly intimated, that we may be in a constant 
attitude of watching. ‘‘Watch ye, therefore’’ are the 
significant words used. Some one has deseribed our 
Lord’s return as ‘‘imminent,’’ and then has defined 
‘“*Imminent’’ as meaning ‘‘Liable to come at any time, 
and certain to come at some time.’’? ‘There could not 
possibly be a better presentation of New Testament 
teaching. The Saviour may keep us waiting for His 
second advent as He kept His ancient people waiting 
for His first advent. They waited for Him four thou- 


OUR LORD’S RETURN TO THE EARTH 169 


sand years, and when He came they were not ready for 
Him. His Church has been waiting for His second com- 
ing for nearly two thousand years, and there is great 
danger that when He comes we shall be taken by sur- 
prise once more. 

The fact of His coming is put beyond dispute for all 
who will accept God’s Word. There is no hesitation in 
the announcement. It is not given as a probability. 
The promise is not made as a possible thing depending 
for its fulfillment on certain other things being done. It 
is not ‘‘perhaps He will come.’’ It is ‘‘Behold He 
eometh.’’ There is no other event that is so frequently 
and emphatically proclaimed. From Enoch down to the 
last apostle the uniform declaration is, ‘‘The Lord 
shall come with ten thousand of his saints.’’ The Bible 
is full of it. It is not simply hinted at in an occasional 
text; it is dogmatically declared hundreds of times. 
We need no other assurance than His word, for when 
our Lord says He will do a thing we may be confident 
that He will do it. 

This promise that the Saviour will return in glory to 
this world is very satisfying to all our instincts as to 
what is right and appropriate. We like to see things 
come to completeness. Flowers that wither before they 
bloom, wheat that never heads, orchards that never get 
beyond the blossom, fruit that rots before it ripens, men 
of genius who never achieve, institutions that never get 
beyond the program of their initiation, we turn from 
all these things with a sense of bitter disappointment. 
We would rather have a small promise redeemed than a 
great one unredeemed. 

Every thoughtful man feels that the career of our 
Lord in this world is not complete. Our hearts and. 
minds demand something more’ of a climax than the 


170 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


resurrection, after which He appeared only to His own, 
followed by a quiet ascension. As far as they go they 
are well enough, but they fall short of what we feel is 
an appropriate consummation of the Saviour’s work. 
And it does not meet the case to say that Christianity 
is a plant whose roots are in this world but its full 
fruition is in heaven; that it is a building whose founda- 
tions are here, but the capstone in the other world; that 
its beginnings we have with us, and its consummation is 
somewhere else. We somehow feel that what is begun 
here should have its completion here. We feel that since 
the Lord achieved His salvation in this world, the full 
results and glory of it should be witnessed in the very 
place where they were so laboriously wrought out. And 
the Bible approves this way of thinking. It tells of the 
time when the Lord Jesus shall return to this world and 
crown with glory the work of the redemption that He 
began in tears and blood; when He shall restore the har- 
mony that sin turned into discord; when the works of 
the devil shall be destroyed and the work of salvation 
shall issue in glory everlasting. It is very satisfying to 
our hearts to think that there is coming a time when 
the Lord Jesus will be vindicated in the very world 
where He suffered, and that where His cross stood His 
throne will be set up. 

What is the use of this doctrine? It ought to impel 
us to activity. If our Lord is to return we naturally 
would strive to be diligent during His absence. If He 
is likely to return at any time we are apt to be per- 
petually diligent so that whenever He comes He will 
find us ready for Him. And yet we must admit that 
sometimes the reverse of this is the effect. Like the 
apostles to whom the angels spoke in the text we are 
sometimes so taken up with gazing into heaven that 


OUR LORD’S RETURN TO THE EARTH 171 


we forget our duties on earth. We are more prone to 
dreaming than to doing. We delight in visions rather 
than tasks. We imagine that the Christian life is made 
up of sanctified leisure instead of sanctified drudgery. 
We indulge wishes to fly away and be at rest, instead 
of bestirring ourselves and going out to do our work. 
We need to remember that the Christian life is no mere 
reverie about spiritual things. Only a very small part 
of our experience is made up of lying on Jesus’ bosom. 
That delight belongs to heaven. ‘Toil is our lot on earth. 
Christianity is not a sentimental trance, but incessant, 
intense labour. The Christian life is active rather than 
contemplative. We need to recall our hands from idle- 
ness and our minds from spiritual woolgathering, and 
busy them both with the work of a world’s redemption. 
The Christian’s business on earth is not to be idly peer- 
ing into the sky for a glimpse of his returning Lord but 
to follow that Lord’s example on earth as he goes about 
doing good. 

I suppose that the angels gave this promise to the 
apostles not so much by way of rebuke as by way of 
comfort. These bereaved men stood gazing at the place 
in the clouds where the Saviour had entered. They had 
an unspeakable sense of loss. Perhaps they were think- 
ing they had lost Him forever. We do not know how 
long they stood there. But so far as we ean see they 
were riveted to the place and God had to send His 
angels to arouse them from their reverie, and those angels 
brought them the comforting message, ‘‘He has gone, 
but he will return.’’ That hope was intended to lighten 
every trial, and to sweeten every duty. It did that for 
them. It has done that for us. The blessed assurance 
that the Lord will return to His own has stood God’s 
people in good stead in every age. In times of pros- 


172 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


perity and worldly ease men may have lost their grip 
on this doctrine, but in times of distress and danger and 
persecution they have laid hold on it and gotten inspira- 
tion and strength from it to do better. 

Certainly the great leaders who created new epochs 
in Christian history did not hold this doctrine lightly, 
but cherished it as their one great hope. Martin Luther, 
in the midst of the turmoil attending the Reformation, 
wrote, ‘‘I ardently hope that amidst these internal dis- 
sensions on earth Jesus Christ will hasten the day of 
His coming.’’ The acute and learned John Calvin saw 
that this was the Church’s true hope and he said, ‘‘ We 
must hunger after Christ till the dawning of the great 
day when our Lord will fully manifest the glory of His 
kingdom. The wholé family of the faithful will keep 
in view that day.’’ Even the intrepid soul of John Knox 
was upheld by this hope. He wrote to a friend in Eng- 
land, ‘‘ Has not the Lord Jesus in spite of Satan’s malice 
carried up our flesh into heaven? And shall He not re- 
turn? We know He shall return, and that with ex- 
pedition.’”’? John Wesley declared that wickedness 
should prevail until Christ comes to reign on earth. 
Charles Wesley, hymnologist of the Methodist Church, 
who has cheered the whole world by his sacred melodies, 
wrote: 

“Trusting in the literal word, 
We look for Christ on earth again; 


Come, our everlasting Lord, 
With all Thy saints to reign.”’ 


It was the unceasing prayer of Richard Baxter who 
wrote The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. He wrote, ‘‘ Hasten, 
QO my Saviour, the time of Thy return. Send forth 
Thine angels, and let the dreadful, joyful trumpet 
sound. Thy desolate bride saith, ‘Come, even so, come, 


OUR LORD’S RETURN TO THE EARTH 173 


Lord Jesus.’ ’’ These all died, not having received the 
promise. But if we would follow in the footsteps of 
these great men of the Church we must cherish the hope 
that sustained them in their trials and was the inspira- 
tion for all the work they did. 

You are familiar with the picture of the maiden stand- 
ing on the shore looking out over the sea and waving 
her handkerchief in welcome to her returning lover. 
He had been absent from her many a long day. She 
had watched for his coming until hope deferred made her 
heart utterly sick. Sometimes she saw a distant sail 
that she fancied was his. But it passed on and her hopes 
vanished with it. Many a time she arose in the morn- 
ing murmuring to herself, ‘‘Surely he will come to- 
day,’’ only to watch vainly during the long hours until 
night came, and she lay down worn out with her disap- 
pointment. But at last the day she had prayed for 
came. She saw the gleam of the sail as soon as it ap-. 
peared above the horizon. On it came, her hopes rising 
with its approach. Her faithfulness and patience were 
at last to have their appropriate reward. As the vessel 
drew near she thought she could descry her lover stand- 
ing in the forward part of it looking as anxiously for her 
as she was looking for him. She ran at once to a con- 
spicuous place on the promontory, and while her heart 
beat fast with love and her eyes were filled with tears 
of gladness, she waved to her lover the white symbol of 
her welcome home. So the Church watches for her ab- 
sent Lord, often with fainting heart because His com- 
ing is so long delayed. But some day our waiting will be 
rewarded, for our Lord will not disappoint His waiting 
bride. Perhaps before long a day will dawn that has 
no ending, for it will be the beginning of the eternal 
day. Or it may be that He will come in the long watches 


174 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


of the night. We shall hear the ery, ‘‘ Behold, the Bride- 
groom cometh, go ye out to meet him.’’ Those who are 
His will arise and hasten away, and the tired old world, 
though it hears the excitement, will have no notion of 
the glad hopes that are at last finding their fulfillment. 
Or it may be that neither at midnight nor at high noon 
He will come. No man knoweth the hour. It may be 
in the morning when-the sunshine awakes us that we 
shall find ourselves enswathed by that light that never 
was on land or sea. Or it may be at the close of the 
day that He will come. We shall be meditating on our 
day’s work and on the mercy of our God, when lifting 
our eyes, lo! our Beloved will be standing before us. 
Whenever He comes may we be found watching! 

There is no denying that we are eager for our Lord’s 
return. We sigh because He delays. But when I am 
disposed to be impatient that the Lord does not hasten 
His coming, I ask myself whether there is not a good 
reason for the delay. There is a tremendous reason. 
Why did Christ not come yesterday? Why did He not 
come with the morning light to-day? He tells us why. 
He says, ‘‘The Lord is not slack concerning his promise 
as some men count slackness; but is long suffering to- 
ward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all 
should come to repentance.’’ And yet in the face of 
that we chide our Lord that He has delayed His com- 
ing! If He had come yesterday some who will be saved 
to-day would have been lost. If He should come to- 
day, your friend or neighbour, or some one of your dear 
ones would be lost. He delays His coming and you 
thereby have a chance to be the messenger of grace to 
that unsaved one whom you love. The only thing that 
keeps our Lord from bursting at once on the world’s 
astonished gaze is His desire that more of the lost 


OUR LORD’S RETURN TO THE EARTH 175 


should be saved. For after He comes no more appeals 
will be made to the unsaved ; no more prayers will ascend 
for them to a throne of grace. <All who at that time are 
unsaved will remain unsaved forever. That is a good 
reason for delay, isn’t it? Can you be impatient be- 
cause He does not come in the face of such a reason for 
delay as that? But though His coming is delayed, He 
will come. He promised it. He will come. Watch for 
Him. Be ready to greet Him. 


*“So I am watching quietly, every day 
Whenever the sun shines brightly 
I rise and say, 

‘Surely it is the shining of His face’ 
And look upon the gates of His high place 
Beyond the sea. 

For I know He is coming shortly 
To summon me, 


** And when a shadow falls across the window 
of my room, 

Where I am working my appointed task, 

I lift my head to watch the door and ask 

If He is come. 

And then the angel answers sweetly in my home, 

‘Only a few more shadows 
And He will come.’ ”” 


XIT 
THE ALMIGHTINESS OF FAITH 


“Verily I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard 
seed ye shall say to this mountain ‘ Remove to yonder ee 
and wt shall remove; and nothing shall be tmpossible to you’ 
MATTHEW 17: 20. 


NY one reading the New Testament who comes 
A on this verse is sure to stop and think it over, 
and then read it again. It seems at first as 

though we must have misread it. We hardly can be- 
lieve our eyes. But reading it the second time does not 
reduce its meaning in the least. It rather makes it evi- 
dent that the words were carefully chosen. To start 
with, it was Jesus Christ who spoke the words, and He 
never was a careless talker. And He introduces what 
He says about the power of faith by the impressive 
phrase, ‘‘ Verily, I say unto you,’’ which is a clear an- 
nouncement that He has most carefully considered what 
He is saying. And besides in the short compass of that 
single verse He gives the same assurance twice, once in 
picturesque language and once in plain speech. ‘“‘If ye 
have faith as a grain of mustard seed ye shall say to 
this mountain ‘Remove to yonder place’ and it shall re- 
move.’’ Jf that was all He said we might declare simply 
that He was speaking in figurative language and let it 
go at that. But then, lest we should not get what He 
means, He puts it into plain words, ‘‘Nothing shall be. 
impossible to you.’’ How incredible it all seems! What 
an air of unreality this verse has about it in such a 
world as this where so often, as Maarten Maartens says, 
*“Men struggle and struggle, and it all ends in nothing.’’ 

176 


THE ALMIGHTINESS OF FAITH 177 


And then this is not the only time that Christ made 
this remarkable statement. Four chapters further on in 
this book of Matthew He says the same thing again. 
Here in the text He was talking to His disciples who 
eould not cast the demon out of the afflicted child. He 
pointed to Mount Hermon on whose side they stood and 
He said, ‘‘If you only had faith you could say to this 
mountain, ‘Remove,’ and it would remove.’’ In the 
other instance He was explaining to His disciples the 
withering of the fig tree at His word and He said, *‘Do 
not be surprised at this,’? and then pointing at Mount 
Olivet which was just at hand, He said, ‘‘Have faith, 
and do not doubt and ye shall not only do this which 
is done to the fig tree, but ye shall say to this mountain, 
‘be thou removed and be thou cast into the depths of the 
sea,’ and it shall be done.’’? And then Luke speaks of 
the time when he declared that faith as a grain of 
mustard seed could pluck up a sycamine tree by the 
roots and plant it in the sea. 

Clearly enough we cannot get rid of this amazing 
declaration of the Master. He made it so often and so 
emphatically that the disciples could not forget it, and 
they have put it down for us as plainly as words ever 
were put in black ink on white paper. But what shall 
we do with the verse? We may wish it was not there, 
but it is there. We cannot deny it. Jesus Christ said 
it. So far as I know nobody whose opinion is at all 
worth considering denies that we have here a real say- 
ing of Jesus Christ. But we have to admit being puz- 
zled by it. Commentators have little or nothing to say 
about it. Plain people reading their Bible look at it 
hopelessly and pass it by. 

Very often you can learn the meaning of a thing by 
trying it out in a practical test. But most of us have 


178 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


been afraid to put this text to the test. Not that we fear 
it might prove itself true and we should remove some 
mountain from its base, and we be involved in unfor- 
tunate complications. But we are afraid it would prove 
itself false and all our faith would come down in col- 
lapse. We are afraid of repeating the oft-told experi- 
ence of the old woman who had a mountain in front of 
her cottage door. It was a great annoyance to her, and 
she resolved on the authority of this verse to pray it 
out of the way. So one night before she went to bed 
she prayed the Lord very earnestly that in the morn- 
ing the mountain should be gone. Then she went to sleep. 
When she awoke in the morning she crept cautiously to 
the door and opened it. Things were just as they always 
had been. Not a boulder was changed from its posi- 
tion. The old woman blurted out, ‘‘It isn’t gone, and 
I knew it wouldn’t be.’’ To be sure that was not a fair 
test. Hers was not a mountain-moving faith. Mark 
says “‘We must not doubt.’’ The word that Mark uses 
Paul uses in Romans 4: 20, where he says that Abra- 
ham ‘ ‘staggered not’’ at the promise, and it is used also 
by James where he says that those yet ask for wisdom 
must ask in faith ‘‘nothing wavering.’’ We seem to be 
unable to summon up that unwavering, that unstagger- 
ing faith. We have not faith enough to put the promise 
to a real test. And so we pass it by wondering what it 
can mean anyhow, and the promise that was intended to 
be an inspiration and a comfort to us proves to be our 
bewilderment and our despair. 

T often wish that people would handle the Bible nat- 
urally and let it talk to them as other books do. We 
should not be perplexed by it so often if we did that. I 
often wish that men would remember that when Christ 
spoke He did not use the stilted phrase of the academies, 


THE ALMIGHTINESS OF FAITH Lie 


but He talked as the average man of the street does. 
His meaning would be clear then where now we are 
puzzled or troubled by it. Christ’s address was saturated 
by the homely wit of the people. He often made His 
appeals to the crowd in the very phrases that were fre- 
quently on their own lips. He never was dull and 
prosaic. The Scribes and the Pharisees were. They 
were always making a show of their learning, and a 
show of learning for its own sake is always stupid and 
dull. 

Now with this in mind let us take the text bit by bit 
and look at it. First, Christ speaks of faith “‘as a grain 
of mustard seed.’?’ I have heard men speak of the 
strength of a mustard seed as though that were the 
point. Oh no! Christ had the smallness of the seed in 
mind. He wanted to use in His illustration the smallest 
thing He could think of. And the mustard seed was the 
common people’s symbol of smallness. They were coun- 
try people He was talking to. They knew about seeds. 
And as soon as the great Teacher looked at them re- 
proachfully and said, ‘‘If your faith was as big as a 
grain of mustard seed,’’ they would know what He 
meant. Some man who has studied astronomy says, 
*‘This world of ours is but a speck of dust floating in 
space.’’ We do not, take him literally. It really is a 
world of some size, but compared with a world a hun- 
dred thousand times its size it is as nothing. We speak 
of a man who has a small way of looking at things and 
we express our contempt of him by saying, ‘‘That man 
is as big as a peanut.’’ We say of some stingy wretch, 
‘““He is so small that you would need a microscope to 
find him.’’ And on the other hand we say of some 
generous fellow, ‘‘He has a heart as big as an ox.’’ 
When we-use such phrases nobody is puzzled. Nobody 


180 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


but a hopeless fool would take us literally. Why, then, 
cannot we allow Christ to use in talking to us the same 
sort of language that we are accustomed to use in talk- 
ing with one another, and not try to put mysterious 
meanings into His every-day speech ? 

To be sure, that is the easiest part of the text. Per- 
haps it was unnecessary to dwell on it at all. The puz- 
zling thing to us is the unlimited power which Christ 
attributes to a little faith. He was full of emotion as 
He stood there. He sympathized with the sorrowing 
father. He pitied the suffering boy whose father sought 
his healing. He was grieved at the impotent disciples. 
And as He stood in the midst of that distracted throng, 
He waved His hand toward Hermon at whose foot they 
stood, and said, ‘‘If you only had faith, just a little real 
faith, you could say to this mountain ‘Get out of the 
way,’ and it would go.’’ They did not misunderstand 
Him. The words fell naturally from His lips. They 
had Oriental minds that were used to soaring, and were 
not held down to earth by such prosaic habits as often 
enchain us. They knew that He meant that if they had 
real faith they could do things that were looked upon as 
impossibilities, and that what were obstacles insuperable 
to other men would vanish at their word. 

Ever since men have been able to think they have 
used mountains in a figurative sense. I had in my child- 
hood a little book that was a perpetual delight to me. 
It had pictures in it made by John Tenniel, the famous 
illustrator for the London Punch. One of them was 
the picture of a mountain with a little mouse sitting on 
the side of it. There could be seen a little hole out of 
which the mouse had come. The mountain was shrouded 
in smoke as though it was in convulsion. Underneath 
the picture were the words, ‘‘The mountain groaned 


THE ALMIGHTINESS OF FAITH 181 


and brought forth a mouse.’’ The book will be easily 
recognized as Atsop’s Fables. AXsop amused and in- 
structed and enraged men by the fables he told more 
than five hundred years before Christ spoke of this moun- 
tain moving off at the order of the man who is full of 
faith. Men never have been at a loss to know what 
AXsop meant by this fable of the groaning mountain. 
They knew that he meant to set forth tremendous strug- 
gle with little result. 

It was a common thing for the Jews of Christ’s day 
to speak of any mighty man as a mover of mountains. 
Colonel Roosevelt would have been so spoken of. Mar- 
shall Foch would have deserved to be, for surely in the 
World War, mountain-like difficulties were obliterated at 
his command. Napoleon Bonaparte was a mover of 
mountains. When Napoleon was planning to cross the 
mountains to attack Italy he was reminded that the Alps 
were impassable, and that intrepid man waved his hand 
and said, ‘‘There shall be no Alps.’’ Nobody misunder- 
stood him. That is precisely what Christ meant. He 
said, ‘‘If a man has but faith he can put mountains out 
of the way.’’ Do not be bewildered by such a state- 
ment as that. Thank God for the assurance it gives 
you when you are beset by difficulties that threaten to 
defeat you in your purposes. 
~ Now what shall we do with the last sentence of the 
text, ‘And nothing shall be impossible to you’’? Of 
course we must not be literalists in trying to get its 
meaning, either. That statement is not true literally 
even of God. A little maid once asked, ‘‘Can God tell 
a lie?’’ The Bible uses that very word ‘‘impossible’’ 
concerning that. The writer of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews says, ‘‘It was impossible for God to lie.’? And 
in writing to Titus Paul speaks of ‘‘God who cannot 


182 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


lie.’’ We never say of God as the Germans said of the 
State, ‘‘Nothing is wrong for the State.’’ We say 
rather, ‘‘The Judge of all the earth must do right.”’ 
There are moral limitations even on God, and there are 
physical limitations on God also. Dr. Henry G. Wes- 
ton, so long the president of Crozer Seminary, used to 
say smilingly to his classes that even God could not 
make an old table. Of course He could not. He is 
limited in what He does by the nature of things, that is 
by the character of His own being. So it need not sur- 
prise us that the statement ‘‘Nothing shall be impos- 
sible’’ to the man of faith is not to be taken literally. 
There is nothing that we need more in the interpreta- 
tion of Seripture than common sense. And if we have 
but common sense there is little Scripture that we cannot 
understand. This sentence ‘‘ Nothing shall be impossible 
to you’’ is paralleled by things we see every day. I 
was called on the telephone some time ago by a busi- 
ness man who made of me an inquiry about the ability 
of a man whom I know very well. He said, ‘‘Isn’t he 
a dreamer? ’’ I said, ‘‘He is not a mere dreamer. He 
does dream great things, but more than any man I know 
he brings his dreams to pass. He can achieve the im- 
possible. When he undertakes to do a thing, he never 
lets go until it is done and well done.’’ That is what 
Christ meant to say faith ean do. If aman has faith 
in his project and will stick at his job, and in spite of 
all discouragements will go on, nothing in the world will 
defeat him. The famous Frenchman, Mirabeau, when 
he was told that a certain plan of his was impossible 
said, ‘‘Impossible! speak not to me of that blockhead 
of a word.’’ The elder Pitt after some one had told 
him that a certain thing he had planned could not be 
done replied, ‘‘Can’t be done? Impossible? I trample 


THE ALMIGHTINESS OF FAITH 183 


on impossibilities.’? With such men nothing is impos- 


sible. Mountains are scaled by them as though they 
were mole-hills, or they are pushed bodily aside. Men 
said again and again that Theodore Roosevelt could do 
anything. And it is a fact that his powers were so 
many and so varied that little men always were jealous 
of him., One of the New York newspapers that differed 
with him in polities said that no one could understand 
how he did so much; that he achieved the impossible; 
he fairly worked miracles. That is what the text means. 
A man who has real faith can remove mountains. He 
ean do anything at all. A man who has real faith has 
at his command a power greater than there is anywhere 
else in the world. 

Certainly that seemed to be the case with the early 
Christian believers. Primitive Christianity was a re- 
ligion of power. It was not so much a matter of form 
as much religion is to-day, though early Christianity 
had its forms and ceremonies. It was not simply a sys- 
tem of doctrine, though it held to certain truths which 
it insisted upon as stoutly as any creed-maker. But it, 
was preéminently a thing of power. It did things. The 
people were so astonished at what it did that they said, 
‘“We never saw it on this fashion.’’ It could change 
loathsome disease into health. It could shake open 
prison doors. It could change the character of men. It 
could set whole communities in such turmoil that men 
declared that the world was turned upside down. If 
there had been newspapers in those days every morn- 
ing’s leader would have told of what the Christians were 
doing. They were charged with being sensationalists. 
They were the subjects of gossip and scandal. The police 
were called out to suppress them. Some of them were 
executed as common criminals. And yet they went on 


184 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


with their work. And before a generation had passed 
they had carried the Gospel to the ends of the earth. 

And we ought not to be satisfied unless the Church is 
constantly achieving results that are pleasing to Jesus 
\Christ, and impressive to the world. There have been 
‘a great many times when the Church has been so full of 
faith that the world was forced to notice her. It was 
so at Pentecost when the Church was started. It was so 
in the Protestant Reformation when Martin Luther 
preached the doctrine of Justification by Faith in sueh 
loud, clear tones that we can hear him still four hundred 
years after his death. It was so at the time of the 
Methodist Revival when the Wesleys turned England and 
America upside down. It was so in the Great Awaken- 
ing of Jonathan Edwards’ day, when men shook with 
terror at the enormity of their sins. It was so in the 
days when Charles G. Finney went up and down the 
land, and men were often convicted of their sins as soon 
as he arose to preach, and before he had uttered a word. 
It was so in the great revival that swept over the land 
in 1857 and 1858, when there were hardly churches 
enough to accommodate the people who wished to hear 
the Gospel. It was so in 1876 when Dwight L. Moody 
put himself unreservedly into God’s hands, and God 
used him to usher tens of thousands into the kingdom of 
heaven. 

It would seem as though these demonstrations of 
power ought not to be unusual things, but ought to be 
the normal experiences of the Church. The Church ecan- 
not live on recollections of those days of power any more 
than you can live on last year’s bread, or ean quench 
your thirst with the water you drank a year ago. The 
outside world very quickly discovers whether we have 
had an experience of God’s power of our own, or whether 


THE ALMIGHTINESS OF FAITH 185 


we are simply telling them over again the experiences of 
some distant past. If the people of the world do not 
find in the Church a power to redeem men, and make 
the bad over into the good, such as the Church once had; 
if they do not find in the people of the Church something 
extra in the way of purity and patience and kindness,, 
and real goodness, something beyond the ordinary in 
zeal for the right, and faith in God and all those fine 
enthusiasms that make life worth while, then we need 
not wonder if they do not darken our church doors and 
if they close their hearts against our Lord. If we have 
nothing to give them but what they already have, we 
need not expect them to accept our invitations. Men 
have a right to expect more from the Church than from 
the world. The Church, like her Lord, is supernatural. 
We have a right to expect signs and wonders from her. 
She claims to have with her the almighty God, and if 
she has, her people ought to show greater devotion to 
her than worldly people show to the organizations with 
which they are in membership. If they show no rare 
devotion to her worship and her work the world is right. 
when it ignores her high profession. 

Just as surely as we are the Lord’s people this ideal 
of mighty faith, and fiery devotion, and impressive 
achievement, is the ideal we have for our own church. 
The one thing that the members of a church long for 
more than anything else is that God shall be so mani- 
festly with them that people who come into their services 
of worship shall say, ‘‘ This is none other than the house 
of God and this is the gate of heaven,’’ and that the 
people shall go home after the worship saying with rev- 
erential gratitude, ‘‘We have seen strange things to- 
day.’’ If we can have such evidence of God’s presence 
with us, we need have no concern for anything else. 


186 CAN WE BELIEVE? 


That is vastly better than any amount of money, for no 
money can buy the power of the Holy Ghost. It is vastly 
better than a costly house of worship, for of what use 


‘is the most magnificent temple built for the glory of 
God, if God never shows forth His glory in it? I should 
'a great deal rather preach in a barn to a people who 


have God with them than in a gorgeous temple and have 
no sign of God’s presence. I should ten thousand times 
rather preach with no roof over my head and have God 
work miracles of grace through my faith than to preach 
in a cathedral and have no mighty work done. The 
Church’s business is to be everlastingly manifesting the 
power of God in effecting the salvation of men. 

Would to God that none could hint that the Church’s 
power is now declining. Its Lord’s power has not de- 
clined and He is ever ready to impart power to men or 
women who exercise faith in Him. I am not unmind- 
ful of all the good things the Church has done and all 
the splendid truths she stands for. If you could go 
through the lands of the Orient as I have, and see the 
hideousness of the worship in some temples, and the 
barrenness of the worship in other temples, and the filthi- 
ness of the inscriptions on others still, any place of 
Christian worship would seem so lovely to you that you 
could fall down on your knees and kiss the stones of 
which it was built. But any one who loves Jesus Christ 
must wish His Church to be always at her best, and we 
cannot be satisfied to have the past days more splendid 
than the present. We feel that things are not right 
unless Christ’s Church is always achieving results that 
arrest attention, and we hear men saying, ‘‘We never 


saw it on this fashion.’’ 


Would to God that Christ’s people would forget all 
other things for the sake of this one great thing. Would 


THE ALMIGHTINESS OF FAITH 187 


that they would hold all other things subordinate to this. 

Would that they would talk of nothing else except how | 
we may demonstrate to an unbelieving world that faith | 
in Christ is still mighty. .There is practically no limit | 
to what a few determined people can do. Really it is | 
true, that if you have faith nothing is impossible to 

you. A dozen men banded together in Christ’s name 

could make their church a mighty church, and such a 

place of salvation as would lead men there to find a 

Saviour. A few young men banded together redeemed. 
England socially, politically and religiously, and saved | 
her from a bloody revolution into which, for lack of 
such young men, France plunged. A few young men 

so banded together, praying under the shelter of a hay- 

stack at Williamstown, Mass., started the modern mis- 

slonary movement in America. The young men of any 

church could do such a thing as that if they gave them- 

selves to it in faith. The young women of any church 

eould do it. A little company of Christian people who) 
would not be daunted could redeem any community. | 
Would to God the people in our churches would do it! 

Would that Christ’s people would show themselves 

people of faith, and the Church demonstrate anew its 

power, and the people of the world be redeemed! 


frinted in the United States of America 








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